CERN news : ALPHA2 ANTIMATTER

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CERN experiment makes spectroscopic measurement of antihydrogen Geneva, 7 March 2012. In a paper published online today by the journal Nature, the ALPHA collaboration at CERN* reports an important milestone on the way to measuring the properties of antimatter atoms. This follows news reported in June last year that the collaboration had routinely trapped antihydrogen atoms for long periods of time. ALPHA's latest advance is the next important milestone on the way to being able to make precision comparisons between atoms of ordinary matter and atoms of antimatter, thereby helping to unravel one of the deepest mysteries in particle physics and perhaps understanding why a Universe of matter exists at all. "We've demonstrated that we can probe the internal structure of the antihydrogen atom," said ALPHA collaboration spokesman, Jeffrey Hangst, "and we're very excited about that. We now know that it's possible to design experiments to make detailed measurements of antiatoms." Today, we live in a Universe that appears to be made entirely of matter, yet at the Big Bang, matter and antimatter would have existed in equal amounts. The mystery is that all the antimatter seams to have gone, leading to the conclusion that nature must have a slight preference for matter over antimatter. If antihydrogen atoms can be studied in detail, as ALPHA's latest result suggests, they may provide a powerful tool for investigating this preference. Hydrogen atoms consist of an electron or

Published 2012-03-07 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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