CERN Discovers Antimatter Light Spectrum After 20 Year Search!

originally posted by: Bedlam
It would have been neater if it had emitted dark.

And while going back in time.

Positronium... i wonder if antimatter atoms are limited to just hydrogen.

shouldn't be limited to just hydrogen, but, for lets say creating anti-helium you need to not only create multiple anti protons, but anti-neutrons also, and control a fusion process to bind them all being done before they smack into any regular matter...

Not what id call easy to do

originally posted by: BASSPLYR

originally posted by: Bedlam
It would have been neater if it had emitted dark.

And while going back in time.

Positronium... i wonder if antimatter atoms are limited to just hydrogen.

Lol thats is harder to get than Unobtanium isnt it?

originally posted by: ErosA433
shouldn't be limited to just hydrogen, but, for lets say creating anti-helium you need to not only create multiple anti protons, but anti-neutrons also, and control a fusion process to bind them all being done before they smack into any regular matter...

Not what id call easy to do

To contain anti-matter you need strong magnetic fields. To do fusion, you need even stronger magnetic fields.

a reply to: stormcell

Need strong electric/magnetic fields and extremely good vacuum. None of which is trivial. Its easier to type just how to do it than it is actually to do it.

Most people who say 'oh you just need to do x' often don't actually understand anything of the realities.

Examples
Chambers need to be formed from stainless steel usually, plastics cannot be used because trapped gases and sorbed gasses. But stainless Steel is not perfect either, why? well because stainless still has grain boundaries, has imperfections in the surfaces which trap gas. At high vacuum, thanks to chemical phase states depending upon pressure many atmospherics basically stick to surfaces and effectively become solids or frozen. Their removal from the chamber is then a matter of thermal chance.

So issue? well Stainless Steel tends to have hydrogen and other things like Carbon Dioxide effectively diffusing out of the grain boundaries and into the chamber... meaning... yep thats right, you have lots of hydrogen floating around your anti-matter storage chamber, not only that but that hydrogen can be electrically neutral... where is can come into contact with all that antimatter you want to store and manipulate.

Highest vacuum achieved on the Earth thus far is around 1000 atoms per cubic meter, which is extremely hard to achieve. Vacuum of space is something like 2-5 atoms per cubic meter

High magnetic fields are one thing but if you are going to random chance it with a few thousand particles to achieve fusion... i hazard a guess they will interact with chamber gasses at a faster rate than to fuse.

a reply to: AMPTAH

In other words, since humans also lose their teeth as they get older, if we're able to extend the life of a human, we might just find that the oldest living humans grow beaks, as the beak genes get switched on naturally sometime after tooth decay.

Except, the beak gene isn't in our DNA.

a reply to: ErosA433

How are they keeping neutral antimatter constrained?

a reply to: Bedlam

its a Penning trap,
alpha.web.cern.ch...

The idea being that you create and cool the positrons and anti-protons and then sort of shunt them into the trap, on the Alpha experiment it is apparently an octopole coil with a couple of end coils. The strength of the field should be such that the middle of it is high but has a little dip in the middle. The reason is that you want to push in your anti-protons and positrons with just enough energy to get over the initial field barrier, but not have enough to make it out the other side. Once the particles are captured, they naturally then mix and form anti-hydrogen.

Hydrogen is then held in place magnetically. The limit in hold time i believe is to do with the purity of the chamber as described above, and field stability

originally posted by: ErosA433
a reply to: Bedlam

its a Penning trap,
alpha.web.cern.ch...

I thought Penning traps were only useful for charged particles...

Hydrogen is then held in place magnetically. The limit in hold time i believe is to do with the purity of the chamber as described above, and field stability

So, monatomic hydrogen is paramagnetic, and diatomic hydrogen is diamagnetic, does it squirt out of the confinement if it pairs with another anti-hydrogen?

Or is that backwards because it's antimatter?

Good question, not sure

Anti-Hydrogen does have a magnetic moment so the idea is it would seem that with the positrons and ant-protons being held on either side of the penning trap, you use RF acceleration to nudge them into the middle of the trap. The ones that make it over the field potential and have basically zero energy left will be successfully trapped. The rest will just hit the outside walls of the trap and annihilate.

The positrons and anti-protons in the trap would form the anti-hydrogen, and assuming they have minimal energy, would remain trapped in the middle of the device due to the magnetic moment and the magnetic field.

Reading over some light info it seems like they do sweeps with an electric field to remove any charged particles which would help with holding the anti-matter.

Issue then is experimentation, any experiments performed on it, would likely depart energy, and so kick it out of the trap.

a reply to: ADAMandEVIL

I'm finding some cool threads on here, that is excellent, just amazing stuff

Truly a major scientific achievement.
Since the CERN head weighs in at the weight of five jumbo jets, prototypes of equipment that can generate anti-matter will not be in the lab soon. In fact, in certain ways this may not a be a bad thing, as anti-matter weapons will certainly be one of the contributors to further research, IMO.