Cern - 16 minuten antimatter vast weten te houden

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But that is to change: at the Cern particle collider in Geneva, physicists have created and trapped atoms of antihydrogen for more than a thousand seconds, it was announced late on Sunday. It might not sound like long, but it is enough time for experiments that could help answer some of the most fundamental questions in physics.

Antimatter was first postulated by the British physicist Paul Dirac in 1930 while working on a way to reconcile the ideas of quantum mechanics with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Particles of matter and antimatter are identical, except for an opposite electrical charge. An electron has a negative charge, whereas its antiparticle, the positron, has a positive charge, and both have an identical mass. Similarly, a proton and an antiproton are the same size and have the same mass, but have positive and negative charges respectively.

The question scientists want to answer is why antimatter seems to be missing from the universe. The laws of physics do not differentiate between matter and antimatter so, at the creation of the universe during the big bang, equal amounts of both should have been made. For every particle of matter in the universe, there should be a particle of antimatter. In practice, though, we do not see them.

At the start of the universe, cosmologists think, there was probably an infinitesimally small excess of matter particles over antimatter particles. When the particles came into contact and the inevitable annihilations occurred in the earliest seconds of time, the universe was left only with matter particles swimming with copious amounts of energy.

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Op maandag 6 juni 2011 12:16 schreef ATuin-hek het volgende:

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Hoe zit dat eigenlijk met containment als ze geen lading hebben?

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Most precision tests of the properties of antihydrogen can only be done if the antihydrogen were trapped; i.e. held in place for a long time. While antihydrogen atoms are electrically neutral, their spin produces magnetic moments. These magnetic moments will interact with an inhomogeneous magnetic field; some of the antihydrogen atoms will be attracted to a magnetic minimum. Such a minimum can be created by a combination of mirror and multipole fields.[25] Antihydrogen can be trapped in such a magnetic minimum (minimum-B) trap; in November 2010, the ALPHA collaboration announced that they had so trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms for about a sixth of a second.[26][27] This was the first time that neutral antimatter had been trapped.

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Op maandag 6 juni 2011 12:45 schreef NDAsilenced het volgende:
Waarschijnlijk ziet zo'n magnetische val er zo uit:

[ afbeelding ]

hier meer info: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/particle+trap

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Op dinsdag 7 juni 2011 11:14 schreef badisbad het volgende:

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en antimatter bommen en granaten (wel duizend!)

EDIT: ik ben wel benieuwd naar wat we hier mee gaan kunnen, ik heb al vaak gehoord over dit soort onderzoek. het zal ongetijweld een stap vooruit zijn in de ontwikkeling van de mensheid. of zeg ik nu hele gekke dingen?