An American professor is
making the world's biggest antimatter container, capable of
storing over a trillion antimatter particles.
The container -- with walls made up of magnetic and electric
fields -- will help researchers study the elusive material, which
disappears on contact with matter and bonds to atoms in a billionth
of a second, making it almost impossible to observe.
At a meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington 18
February, UC San Diego physics professor Clifford Surko announced he and his team are building "an array
of magnetic bottles akin to a hotel with many rooms, with each room
containing tens of billions of antiparticles".
The "bottles" are used to cool the particles, which slows their
movement and makes them easier to study. By cooling the particles
to a lower energy state, when they can be stored for days at a
time. Once they have been stored and slowed enough to reach a
malleable density, they can be pushed out of the containers in a beam which is then studied (for instance, the
billionth-of-a-second interaction with ordinary atoms can be
observed more clearly and help explain
the two opposing chemistries).
"These beams provide new ways to study how antiparticles
interact or react with ordinary matter," said Surko. "They are very
useful, for example, in understanding the properties of material
In his talk "Taming Dirac's Particle" (physicist Paul Dirac
first proposed the theory of antimatter in 1928), Surko said the
mass container would aid various new studies including the
formation of opposing molecules like antihydrogen, the chemistry of
electron-positron plasmas and even the creation of "an annihilation
gamma ray laser", made from huge beam-bursts of positrons.
Antimatter has already been created in labs using particle
colliders and radioisotopes, however it is difficult to contain for
any length of time because it bursts into gamma radiation on
contact with ordinary matter. In November 2010 physicists working
on the CERN particle
accelerator in Geneva managed to create and trap antihydrogen for the first time, but only for a
tenth of a second (it disappeared on contact with hydrogen).
Ultimately, Surko hopes knowledge gained from the new build will
bring physicists closer to creating "portable traps" that will make
observation and experimentation far easier, and groundbreaking
discoveries a not so distant reality.