CERN Antimatter Experiment Produces First Beam of Antihydrogen

An anonymous reader writes "Matter and antimatter annihilate immediately when they meet, so aside from creating antihydrogen, one of the key challenges for physicists is to keep antiatoms away from ordinary matter. To do so, experiments take advantage of antihydrogen's magnetic properties (which are similar to hydrogen's) and use very strong non-uniform magnetic fields to trap antiatoms long enough to study them. However, the strong magnetic field gradients degrade the spectroscopic properties of the (anti)atoms. To allow for clean high-resolution spectroscopy, the ASACUSA collaboration developed an innovative set-up to transfer antihydrogen atoms to a region where they can be studied in flight, far from the strong magnetic field (scientific paper)."

Pure Anti-Hydrogen?

[cold fjord]

That is only one ionization away from something potentially very dangerous [youtube.com].

Typical egg-heads, over thinking

[mcmonkey]

This may be a case where the experts are too close to the problem to see the simple solution.

Put the antihydrogen in a container made of antimatter, then annihilation will not be an issue.

Perhaps some sort of rigid anti-dirigible

News for nerds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stuff that anti-matters.

Re:I"m working on anti-oxygen

[bunratty]

There are no known reports of fatalities due to it, and there are no regulations against its use, so I conclude it must be perfectly safe!

Re:First!

[martyb]

Anti-hydrogen weapon?

'Weapons that don't work if there is matter between you and the target' are probably kind of a niche at present...

So, basically, if an enemy got hold of this, it wouldn't matter? ;)

Human-centrism

[Tablizer]

The annihilation of a single hydrogen atom probably isn't going to hurt much, it's not that much energy.

I'm a proton, and it blew my electrons clean off, you insensitive clod! I had to move in with relatives to remain stable.