CERN Antimatter Experiment Produces First Beam of Antihydrogen 136
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)."
Will this open Stein;s Gate? (Score:1, Flamebait)
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Steins;Gate bro.
First! (Score:2)
Re:First! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First! (Score:5, Funny)
So, basically, if an enemy got hold of this, it wouldn't matter? ;)
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Just shoot it behind a powerful laser blast.
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Precisely. Something in front to cleanup the matter along the way, then the anti-hydrogen. But its probably easier to fire positrons.
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[...] the nuclear chemistry chapters [...]
It's spelled Nucular.
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for the record [youtube.com]
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In that case just make it a bomb and store the anti-matter inside it.
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That would maybe clear out the most of the electrons (as done in laser plasma wakefield acceleration), but leave the ions behind.
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One could say It matters so little it antimatters.
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What are the chances of hitting space debris of some sort?
Hold that thought... Can we use this thing to clean the orbit or the path before, let's say the ISS?
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The solar wind might not be all that dense [hypertextbook.com], but I still wouldn't chance the antimatter finding a random ion too close to the launcher.
Re:First! (Score:4, Interesting)
The annihilation of a single hydrogen atom probably isn't going to hurt much, it's not that much energy.
Human-centrism (Score:3, Funny)
I'm a proton, and it blew my electrons clean off, you insensitive clod! I had to move in with relatives to remain stable.
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The solar wind might not be all that dense [hypertextbook.com], but I still wouldn't chance the antimatter finding a random ion too close to the launcher.
Depending on the altitude, there's more up there than just the solar wind. The escaped particles from the ionosphere, for one.
Much of the space environment around the earth (in fact in the whole universe) contains plasma at varying densities. Whether an antimatter beam could travel very far in earth orbit would depend on its flux and the ambient mean-free path for the antimatter particles in question. I'm not sure what the numbers would be for antimatter, but some quick Googling reveals that non-exotic m
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Pure Anti-Hydrogen? (Score:3, Funny)
That is only one ionization away from something potentially very dangerous [youtube.com].
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SW:EP4 "Stand By..." (Score:3)
This is eerily similar to the famous Death Star scene in Episode IV [youtube.com]. You can even imagine the control panel and sounds are not too different.
I"m working on anti-oxygen (Score:2)
The party potential of anti-H2O is just too great.
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Re:I"m working on anti-oxygen (Score:5, Funny)
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That's where you're wrong. It's completely unregulated and has not been evaluated by the FDA. We need to protect our children from this at all cost.
I'm waiting for anti-helium. (Score:1)
I want anti-helium so I can inhale and talk LOWER.
Re:I'm waiting for anti-helium. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm waiting for anti-helium. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Note that it can settle in the lungs, if you inhale too much and can't exhale it you can suffocate. You won't feel it either because the CO2 will rise and exit the lungs. If you experiment with breathing it in, stand on your head after a few seconds and breathe out/in deeply.
Sounds like a cue for the 'feel yourself breathing' copypasta.
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I know this is a "funny"-because-I'm-intentionally-misunderstanding-science post, but sulfur hexafloride [wikipedia.org] will totally help.
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Just do it in Australia
any form of combustion results in..... (Score:1)
something less useful? what could be more less useful than firing all of our guns at once & exploding into space?
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something less useful? what could be more less useful than firing all of our guns at once & exploding into space?
Who doesn't like heavy metal thunder?
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Typical egg-heads, over thinking (Score:5, Funny)
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
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Good idea. I'll call anti-Hitler; he's always eager to help.
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Only if the container is held by an antiperson; i.e. a politician.
News for nerds... (Score:5, Funny)
Stuff that anti-matters.
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Stuff that anti-matters.
You mean "dash" "Slash" "dot" right? Chroot jail for you!
this is great news! (Score:2)
The first step towards the inevitable anti-Hydrogen Economy, yay!
Cool science coming... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.0847 [arxiv.org]
One of the most interesting physics papers I've read in recent years. Does away with dark matter by presuming that antimatter has the opposite gravitational sign as matter (which pops out very naturally once you apply CPT to general relativity).
As the electromagnetic force is almost 10^40 times stronger than gravity, it would be virtually impossible to test with anti-protons or positrons. But with electrically neutral anti-hydrogen, it becomes potentially testable.
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Committee for the Prevention of Torture?
Current Procedural Terminology?
(Urban Dictionary Warning) Colored People Time?
Re:Cool science coming... (Score:4, Informative)
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Me neither. Things are often helped if people even just read the abstract they're talking about.
"Assuming that a particle and its antiparticle have the gravitational charge of the opposite sign, the physical vacuum may be considered as a fluid of virtual gravitational dipoles. Following this hypothesis, we present the first indications that dark matter may not exist and that the phenomena for which it was invoked might be explained by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum by the known baryoni
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I don't understand where your "negative mass" is coming from.
Another one that never watched ST:TAS... from Memory Alpha's description of Beyond the Farthest Star [memory-alpha.org]:
En route to investigate, the Enterprise suddenly experiences severe hypergravitational effects from Questar M-17's negative star mass.
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Polarized gravitation would also make some forms of man-made time travel possible, which would be quite interesting. It would be very revolutionary if antimatter turned out to have opposite gravitational sign. Unfortunately, we're probably still several years from knowing. Still exciting, though.
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You are mistaken. Antimatter cannot have the opposite gravitational sign as matter in general relativity. If it did, it would be possible to distinguish between an experiment performed in a gravitational field (e.g. standing on earth, antimatter released in a vacuum chamber would "float up") and an experiment performed in an accelerating rocket (e.g. antimatter released in a vacuum chamber would be "left behind" and would "fall down").
You may be familiar with the fact that light is affected by gravitation
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You are mistaken. Antimatter cannot have the opposite gravitational sign as matter in general relativity. If it did, it would be possible to distinguish between an experiment performed in a gravitational field (e.g. standing on earth, antimatter released in a vacuum chamber would "float up") and an experiment performed in an accelerating rocket (e.g. antimatter released in a vacuum chamber would be "left behind" and would "fall down").
It's an assumption that that is true, not a proven thing. We don't know if the gravitational mass of antimatter has the same sign as the inertial mass of antimatter, nor do we know why those two quantities have the same sign (and value) as each other in normal matter. Accumulating enough cold antimatter to be able to measure gravitational effects at all is hard, as is explained elsewhere on this thread. Without the experimental evidence, no amount of armchair theorising is going to be truly sound.
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First off IANAP.
To throw some variables out there:
As I understand it the conjecture under review is:
M(rest)=M(grav)=M(inertia)
Implicit from Einsteins field equations,
R_mu_nu - (1/2)g_mu_nu*R + g_mu_nu*GAMMA = (8pi*G/c^4)*T_mu_nu
somewhat like the next layer beyond E^2=m^4c^4+p^2c^2 (lorentz invarient form iirc?)
I wont see it in my University courses for a few years but from online lectures and pdfs i have a bare understanding of the implications if the conjecture is false:
1. The dark matter problem 'could' g
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IANAP, but there's a few things that occur to me.
First, the impression I get is that they're hypothesizing that matter attracts matter, anti-matter attracts anti-matter, and matter and anti-matter mutually repel. We know that the first is true, the second is not testable until we can get enough anti-matter in one place to measure gravitational effects, and the third might be testable. Can we create a beam of positrons that's sufficiently slow, or travels sufficiently far, that we could measure its disp
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Can I use it in my Anti-Zeppelin?
That would be a Led Zeppelin (kinda like a lead balloon...you can look it up).
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I thought a Led Zeppelin was more like a New Yardbird...
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Anti-Zeppelin sings "Stairway to Hell"
Star Trek technology coming true. (Score:1)
"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)."
Let me guess. It involves the use of Dilithium crystals.
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Doesn't the anti-hydrogen have negative mass, so the combined mass of the hydrogen and anti-hydrogen would be 0? I understand that two photons are created, but I'm not quite sure where the energy comes from.
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Antiparticles have the same mass as their particle counterparts. We haven't actually found anything with negative mass yet, and only have the hypothetical tachyon in that category.
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Oh, I guess I need to do some more reading. I had the impression that anti-particles were basically the opposite of regular particles in every way.
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Nope. Quantum numbers are the opposite, but that's a more subtle thing, since there are particles -- including force carriers -- which are their own anti-particle (which immediately implies, for instance, that positrons and electrons are both influenced by magnetic fields in exactly the same way, just with opposite charge). Mass isn't a quantum number, but is rather... well, basically, a form of energy, so particles and their anti-particles have the same.
(To entertain myself adding a layer of complication o
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Antiparticles have the same mass as their particle counterparts. We haven't actually found anything with negative mass yet, and only have the hypothetical tachyon in that category.
Tachyons don't have negative mass, they have imaginary mass (i.e. m^2 is negative).
Re:ELIAAHM (Score:5, Informative)
They turn into "energy", but it may not be very straightforward. Electrons and anti-electrons (positrons) usually annihilate to a pair of gamma rays - about as close to "pure" energy as you can get.
Anti protons and protons annihilate in a more ugly fashion since each is a bag of quarks. You can get pions that decay into neutrinos and muons which then decay into positrons and neutrinos. The muon decay is fairly slow - ~2 microseconds, enough for them to travel almost a kilometer.
In the end you get gamma rays, neutrinos (of various types), electrons and positrons. The combined energy (both their mass energy and their kinetic energy) of all the particles adds up to the original mass energy of the matter and antimatter, and any other energy put into the process.
Because protons and anti-protons are complex, it is very difficult to make anti-protons - only something like 1/100,000 collisions generates one, the rest just make pions and other junk. Then once you have the anti-protons its difficult to slow them down enough and cool them to where they will combine with the positrons. Is a very impressive and complicated experiment.
BTW- it is not a path to any reasonable energy storage, the efficiency of making anti-protons is much too low. I don't know of any even design concepts that would have usable efficiency.
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Can you put it into a biker gang analogy for me, Dr. Flytrap?
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Sure. When a bunch of Mongols fight a bunch of Hell's Angles, no body mass is lost, some of the mass ends up as blood splatters, some as body parts. If motorcycles are used in the fight, the the total mass energy of the bike-bits will be the same as the starting mass energy.
OK?
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1) is true
2) is true
3) is true... but incomplete, and slightly misunderstands the nature of electromagnetism
electromagnetism is a force carried by photons between protons and electrons -- or between antiprotons and anti-electrons (which are also called positrons). since a photon is its own anti-particle, it's the same force. so we can use *electric* currents to generate magnetic fields that control positronic currents or the movement of charged antimatter.
one way to view a positron is as an electron moving
Cool (Score:1, Offtopic)
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"Antiwater would explode if it came in contact with standard matter.
I do not immediately see trolls."
Then lets find some trolls and test that antiwater idea out.
To boldly start going? (Score:2)
I think this is a good sign to go ahead and start building the Enterprise. Too early?
And for those who care (Score:2)
From:
http://physics.aps.org/article... [aps.org]
Published March 25, 2013 | Physics 6, 36 (2013) | DOI: 10.1103/Physics.6.36
One symmetry that has so far avoided any signs of breaking is the so-called CPT symmetry, which equates matter and antimatter at a fundamental level.
With this data analysis technique, they determined the antiproton’s magnetic moment to be pN=2.792845(12), which has equal magnitude, within experimental uncertainty, to the NIST CODATA recommended value for the proton magnetic mome
Re: [Ignorance] (Score:1, Flamebait)
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Problem?
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Yeah, he rails against Internet anonymity and uses a pseudonym to post. He should make his post under his real name otherwise he's being a hypocrite.
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You can be against anonymous and in favor of pseudoanonymous without being a hypocrite.
There is a huge difference between anonymous and pseudoanonymous.
Pseudoanonymous allows users to be blocked, get a reputation either good or bad, and actually
have a presence. It's been shown that people are even more true to their real self
when using a pseudonym. That's completely different than the anonymous people that
post stuff just to get a respond and would immediately be banned and/or ignored if they had
a real acc
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Yeah, he rails against Internet anonymity and uses a pseudonym to post. He should make his post under his real name otherwise he's being a hypocrite.
Shouldn't you be chasing down a refurbed WWII battleship?
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Erasing moderation