Antimatter Trapped for over Fifteen Minutes - Polidicks

[url]http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20438-fleeting-antimatter-trapped-for-a-quarter-of-an-hour.html[/url] [quote]What can you do with a quarter of an hour? Write a few emails, cook rice – or store antimatter. The team working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have stored atoms of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds – roughly 10,000 times longer than before. This should help reveal if antimatter and matter are true mirror images. Antihydrogen atoms are annihilated by hydrogen. The ALPHA team want to keep antimatter intact long enough to study it, so last year they worked out how to hold a cloud of antihydrogen in a magnetic trap. Not for long, though: collisions with trace gases would have either annihilated the anti-atoms or given them the energy to escape, so the team opened the trap after 170 milliseconds and observed the resulting annihilations, verifying that antimatter had been made. Now they have repeated the experiment, this time waiting much longer before opening the trap. They also cooled the antiprotons used to create the antihydrogen much further, which lowered the energy of the antimatter, allowed more to be squeezed into the trap and raised the chance that some would last longer (arxiv.org/abs/1104.4982). Antimatter's life extension will permit experiments, such as checking whether antihydrogen occupies the same energy levels as hydrogen, "perhaps within the next few years", says Daniel Kaplan of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, who is not on the ALPHA team.[/quote] Nerds can read the full report here: [url]http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.4982[/url] [quote]Antihydrogen, made entirely of antiparticles, is believed to be stable, and it is this longevity that holds the promise of precision studies of matter-antimatter symmetry. We have recently demonstrated trapping of antihydrogen atoms by releasing them after a confinement time of 172 ms. A critical question for future studies is: how long can anti-atoms be trapped? Here we report the observation of anti-atom confinement for 1000 s, extending our earlier results by nearly four orders of magnitude.[/quote] :science:

Is this a new development, or the old story?

So it got out after the fifteen minutes? Or something.

How did they get it in the first place

They trapped it in some magnetic trap. Shit's all magic.

[QUOTE=Bat-shit;29616943]So it got out after the fifteen minutes? Or something.[/QUOTE] No, antimatter is unstable so it just disappears.

Too bad it takes huge ammounts of energy (or so I've been told) to create the antimatter, or it would be a viable source of energy with these new confinement technologies (which I presume will be improved upon vastly).

Quite fast progress. April month's "Illustrerad Vetenskap", a Swedish science magazine, had an article about this and told about how they managed to trap it for like 30 milliseconds and how awesome that was. Now it's all 15 minutes and shit.

Cool thing is it just vanished into thin air, leaving no existing trace - something that all known normal matter isn't capable of, if something gets nuked no single particle would be "annihilated", there is always a trace. Not with anti-something-matter [editline]well piss :[/editline] I have been wrong all this time, so it does leave a trace.

I've read angels and demons and I approve of these news.

[QUOTE=FalconKrunch;29617009]No, antimatter is unstable so it just disappears.[/QUOTE] It just leaks out of the magnetic bottle into its walls, annihilating with the matter on them.

What is antimatter exactly? The polar opposite of matter? And more importantly, where does it come from and where does it go?

[QUOTE=Bat-shit;29616943]So it got out after the fifteen minutes? Or something.[/QUOTE] :derp: OH MY GOD IT COULD BE ANYWHERE!!!! :derp: Now I won't be able to go to sleep tonight because I will be worried that it is hiding under my bed and waiting to kill me when I go to sleep! :eek:

They wanted to know if it occupies the same energy levels as hydrogen, which got me wondering: if anti-hydrogen absorbed a photon of the correct wavelength would it emit a positron when it dropped in energy again? And if so: why? How does the photoelectric effect 'know' whether the atom is a 'regular' atom, or an anti-atom in order to determine if an electron, or positron should be ejected when it loses energy. Also, what differences would that produce in the spectral lines produced? Light that's EM field is 1/2 wavelength out of phase?

Wasn't there an article a month or so ago with scientists actually becoming doubtful if antimatter even exists?

[QUOTE=FalconKrunch;29617009]No, antimatter is unstable so it just disappears.[/QUOTE] It's perfectly stable on its own, but it annihilates the moment it touches ordinary matter, which is why it's so hard to store.

I thought all anti-matter was destroyed in the big bang?

[QUOTE=Mikesword221;29617179]What is antimatter exactly? The polar opposite of matter? And more importantly, where does it come from and where does it go?[/QUOTE] [quote] In [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics"]physics[/URL], all the [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle"]elementary particles[/URL], or the basic building blocks of the things we can touch, come in pairs. Each [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle"]particle[/URL] has what is called an [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiparticle"]antiparticle[/URL], much like an evil twin, which may look and act just like the regular particle, except for one major difference. An example is the [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron"]electron[/URL] and the [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron"]positron[/URL]. They both weigh the same, and act the same, but the electron has a [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative"]negative[/URL] [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity"]electrical[/URL] charge, while the positron has a [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_charge"]positive[/URL] electrical charge, which is where the positron (positive + electron) gets its name. Other antimatter particles are the same way, where they have the same weight, and look and act the same as regular particles, but their electrical charge is the opposite of regular particles. [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihydrogen"]Antihydrogen[/URL], for example, has the positron, which is positively charged, [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit"]orbiting[/URL] around an [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiproton"]antiproton[/URL], which is negatively charged, which is the opposite way regular [URL="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen"]hydrogen[/URL] looks, which has the electron (negative charge), orbiting around a proton (positive charge).[/quote] [url]http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter[/url]

[QUOTE=The mouse;29617974]I thought all anti-matter was destroyed in the big bang?[/QUOTE] We can create our own, It's just highly inefficient to do so.

Now if only they can keep enough of it "alive" long enough to make something out of anti-matter to contain other antimater in the future,

[QUOTE=Karmah;29618106]Now if only they can keep enough of it "alive" long enough to make something out of anti-matter to contain other antimater in the future,[/QUOTE] where would we keep the antimatter container though????

Holy shit this is big. [editline]4th May 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=yawmwen;29618140]where would we keep the antimatter container though????[/QUOTE] in another container made out of magnets

What would happen if you detonate an anti-hydrogen bomb. Supernuke?

[QUOTE=yawmwen;29618140]where would we keep the antimatter container though????[/QUOTE] another antimatter container duh

[QUOTE=V12US;29618644]What would happen if you detonate an anti-hydrogen bomb. Supernuke?[/QUOTE] You'd need anti-uranium 235 to make one, assuming it acts like regular U-235.

[QUOTE=V12US;29618644]What would happen if you detonate an anti-hydrogen bomb. Supernuke?[/QUOTE] You know that one kilogram of antimatter would make explosion equivalent to 20 megaton thermonuclear bomb? Pretty neat.

Finally, I now have something to fill my antiblimps.

[QUOTE=V12US;29618644]What would happen if you detonate an anti-hydrogen bomb. Supernuke?[/QUOTE] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzsj1biDfpQ[/media] Still relevant.

[QUOTE=Nerts;29618753]You'd need anti-uranium 235 to make one, assuming it acts like regular U-235.[/QUOTE] he means just releasing some antihydrogen into the atmosphere, no fancy two-stage device is needed [editline]4th May 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=Zeke129;29616983]How did they get it in the first place[/QUOTE] read the paper it's interesting [quote] Also, the loading of our trap (i.e., [B]anti-atom production via merging of cold plasmas[/B]) is different from that of ordinary atom traps, and the loading dynamics could adversely affect the trapping and orbit dynamics.[/quote]

[QUOTE=sltungle;29617664] Also, what differences would that produce in the spectral lines produced? Light that's EM field is 1/2 wavelength out of phase?[/QUOTE] I remember reading somewhere that it's thought that the spectral lines will be identical to normal matter - but that this with a grain of salt, because I may have read that in a journal, or on one of the "But if I do X and then Y (even though both are impossible) then will time travel exist??!?" threads that pop up here every now and again. [editline]5th May 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=Awesomecaek;29618757]You know that one kilogram of antimatter would make explosion equivalent to 20 megaton thermonuclear bomb? [/QUOTE] Oh god the amount of work required to make a kilo of anti-matter.