CERN experiment creates and traps a beam of anti-hydrogen

Although CERN has created and trapped anti-hydrogen atoms before, it has now announced that it has created a beam of anti-hydrogen. From CERN:
home.web.cern.ch...

The ASACUSA experiment at CERN has succeeded for the first time in producing a beam of antihydrogen atoms. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, the ASACUSA collaboration reports the unambiguous detection of 80 antihydrogen atoms 2.7 metres downstream of their production, where the perturbing influence of the magnetic fields used initially to produce the antiatoms is small. This result is a significant step towards precise hyperfine spectroscopy of antihydrogen atoms.

And from dvice.com:
www.dvice.com...

An successful antimatter experiment at CERN resulted in a beam of anti-hydrogen that scientists have successfully created and trapped. Antimatter consists of subatomic particles that have the same mass as ordinary matter, but an opposite charge. CERN has previously generated antimatter, but never in a way that allowed careful study. This new anti-hydrogen beam, however, could change everything, including what we know about particle physics, because scientists have been able to successfully trap it.

Here's a 2010 ATS thread about CERN first trapping anti-hydrogen atoms, and a 2011 thread about CERN trapping and holding antimatter for almost 17 minutes. The difference is that this is a beam of the anti-hydrogen, almost an entirely different animal when it comes to studying and experimenting with anti-matter particles:

2010 thread: www.abovetopsecret.com...
2011 thread: www.abovetopsecret.com...

Last but least, here's the Wikipedia page for antihydrogen:

en.wikipedia.org...

Most precision tests of the properties of antihydrogen can be done only if the antihydrogen is trapped, meaning 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.

reply to post by Aleister


And next week someone will steal the vial that it is trapped in and hold the world hostage....

Remember Atlantis... They all died from their own technology.


history doth repeat itself...

reply to post by Sakrateri


You watch too much TV.

It doesn't quite work like it does in the Movies.

Is this dark matter or just auntie hydrogen and uncle helium coming for a visit?

ChefSlug
Is this dark matter or just auntie hydrogen and uncle helium coming for a visit?

From the second source:

Maybe this experiment will finally solve at least part of the mystery of antimatter and why it’s so prevalent, yet elusive, in our universe. The experiment will continue into the summer, when CERN hopes to improve their system of trapping the atoms, hoping to gain a sneek peek into what makes the universe tick. This also means we could be one step closer to fueling Star Trek’s warp drive.

Quite a leap from CERN creating a beam to a warp drive, but "big trees from little acorns grow" as my granny used to tell me while I sat on her knee (not true, but she would have told me that if she wasn't so busy harvesting acorns).

A look at the experiments and machine which made this achievement possible. The Atomic Spectroscopy An Collision Using Slow Antiprotons (ASACUSA) experiment, from CERN's website:
home.web.cern.ch...

The Atomic Spectroscopy And Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons (ASACUSA) experiment focuses on the fundamental differences in the behaviour of matter and antimatter. Instead of directly comparing atoms with their corresponding antiatoms (as do the ATRAP and ALPHA experiments), ASACUSA’s physicists are creating hybrid atoms such as “antiprotonic helium”.

The ASACUSA team uses the Antiproton Decelerator at CERN to send a beam of antiprotons into cold helium gas. Most of the antiprotons quickly annihilate with ordinary matter in the surroundings, but a tiny proportion combines with the helium to form hybrid atoms that contain both matter and antimatter. Using laser beams to excite the atoms, ASACUSA can measure the mass of the antiproton to an unprecedented level of accuracy for comparison with the proton.

And the Antiproton Decelerator, which serves four CERN experiments, from CERN's website:
home.web.cern.ch...

The Antiproton Decelerator (AD) provides low-energy antiprotons mainly for studies of antimatter. Previously, “antiparticle factories” at CERN and elsewhere consisted of chains of accelerators, each performing one of the steps needed to provide antiparticles for experiments. Now the AD performs all the tasks alone, from making antiprotons to delivering them to the experiments.

So, you guys are saying that the Starship Enterprise should be outfitted with an anti-hydrogen beam cannon?

Hey what would happen if you fired it at a big pile of burning nuclear fuel?


"Fire!"

reply to post by BlueMule


I don't know about this as it relates to the science of Star Trek, or to the crewman pictured in your post who looks like one of the guys who don't come back from the away-mission, but the quote from the second source in the OP is interesting and hopefully someone with more science knowledge than myself can explain why the writer is ga-ga over its importance:

This new anti-hydrogen beam, however, could change everything, including what we know about particle physics, because scientists have been able to successfully trap it.

reply to post by Aleister


Hey! I came back from that away-mission with only four missing teeth. :p

BlueMule
reply to post by Aleister

 

Hey! I came back from that away-mission with only four missing teeth. :p

Oh, that's you. Glad you made it back. How did the rest of the 5-year mission go?

reply to post by Aleister


Not so great. Got cancelled in the third season.

BlueMule
reply to post by Aleister

 

Not so great. Got cancelled in the third season.

The moral of the story: Always contract for residuals. Took a look at your thread list, quite an interesting mix of topics. I'll take a look at them at some point soon (I remember the Time in A Bottle thread, great episode). I'm a little surprised this thread isn't getting more attention from geeks, nerds, and real scientists, the topic gives a wide opening to real science questions and theories.

Aleister
And from dvice.com:
www.dvice.com...

Nicely done OP with multiple sources!

I think this statement is misleading:

Maybe this experiment will finally solve at least part of the mystery of antimatter and why it’s so prevalent, yet elusive, in our universe.

It's not prevalent, and the fact that matter is so much more abundant than antimatter is one of the unsolved problems in physics.

Baryon asymmetry: Why is there far more matter than antimatter in the observable universe?

and from that link:

The Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Since this is apparently not the case, some physical laws must have acted differently for matter and antimatter.

So maybe antimatter is nearly the opposite of matter but not exactly, which could explain the apparent shortage of antimatter. This provides an interesting area of research to solve an as yet unsolved problem.

Antimatter has been called the most expensive substance:

in 1999, NASA gave a figure of $62.5 trillion per gram of antihydrogen. This is because production is difficult (only very few antiprotons are produced in reactions in particle accelerators), and because there is higher demand for other uses of particle accelerators. According to CERN, it has cost a few hundred million Swiss Francs to produce about 1 billionth of a gram (the amount used so far for particle/antiparticle collisions).

At that price even Bill Gates couldn't have bought a gram of antimetter. I would imagine the cost is coming down, though there are still issues with containment so we are still a long way from using it to power starships.

That's why I find the portayal of antimatter in this docudrama plausible: (spoiler alert) the antimatter drive doesn't do so well compared to the project Orion technology.

Evacuate Earth National Geographic Documentary

Aleister
I don't know about this as it relates to the science of Star Trek, or to the crewman pictured in your post who looks like one of the guys who don't come back from the away-mission,

Nah the guys who don't come back always wear red shirts:

Star Trek TOS: Curse of the Redshirt

ChefSlug
Is this dark matter or just auntie hydrogen and uncle helium coming for a visit?

No anti-particles are confirmed while dark matter is a theory explaining discrepancies between models of predicted galactic formation and reality.

Dark Matter;
astro.berkeley.edu...

We believe that most of the matter in the universe is dark, i.e. cannot be detected from the light which it emits (or fails to emit). This is "stuff" which cannot be seen directly -- so what makes us think that it exists at all? Its presence is inferred indirectly from the motions of astronomical objects, specifically stellar, galactic, and galaxy cluster/supercluster observations.

It is also required in order to enable gravity to amplify the small fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background enough to form the large-scale structures that we see in the universe today. For each of the stellar, galactic, and galaxy cluster/supercluster observations the basic principle is that if we measure velocities in some region, then there has to be enough mass there for gravity to stop all the objects flying apart. When such velocity measurements are done on large scales, it turns out that the amount of inferred mass is much more than can be explained by the luminous stuff. Hence we infer that there is dark matter in the Universe.

Dark matter has important consequences for the evolution of the Universe and the structure within it. According to general relativity, the Universe must conform to one of three possible types: open, flat, or closed. The total amount of mass and energy in the universe determines which of the three possibilities applies to the Universe. In the case of an open Universe, the total mass and energy density (denoted by the greek letter Omega) is less than unity. If the Universe is closed, Omega is greater than unity. For the case where Omega is exactly equal to one the Universe is "flat".

Wiki - en.wikipedia.org...

Anti-particle
en.wikipedia.org...

Corresponding to most kinds of particles, there is an associated antiparticle with the same mass and opposite charge (including electric charge). For example, the antiparticle of the electron is the positively charged electron, or positron, which is produced naturally in certain types of radioactive decay.

The laws of nature are very nearly symmetrical with respect to particles and antiparticles. For example, an antiproton and a positron can form an antihydrogen atom, which has almost exactly the same properties as a hydrogen atom. This leads to the question of why the formation of matter after the Big Bang resulted in a universe consisting almost entirely of matter, rather than being a half-and-half mixture of matter and antimatter. The discovery of CP violation ("CP" denotes "Charge Parity") helped to shed light on this problem by showing that this symmetry, originally thought to be perfect, was only approximate.

Particle-antiparticle pairs can annihilate each other, producing photons; since the charges of the particle and antiparticle are opposite, total charge is conserved. For example, the positrons produced in natural radioactive decay quickly annihilate themselves with electrons, producing pairs of gamma rays, a process exploited in positron emission tomography.

Antiparticles are produced naturally in beta decay, and in the interaction of cosmic rays in the Earth's atmosphere.

I hope this helps somewhat as the to properly explain the concepts I would have to assume you have a working knowledge of the electromagnetic, nuclear, and conceptual knowledge of quantum theory.

I don't want to sound too prudish explaining it this way but basically dark matter is not emitting measurable wavelengths which are understood within the electromagnetic spectrum (wavelengths, but fancy) while anti-particles are more a result of Newton's laws.

-FBB

PS.
More than happy to work on a better explanation if these do not suffice.

Wait they can trap it, so they can build a reserve. I wonder how long they can store it for?

This is going to fuel space ships to find life on exoplanets. I want the update on the warp ship!

ChefSlug
Wait they can trap it, so they can build a reserve. I wonder how long they can store it for?
This is going to fuel space ships to find life on exoplanets. I want the update on the warp ship!

The use magnetic fields to to isolate the anti-particles, its not really a container that they can use to store the anti-particles for fueling spaceships (yet). Also there are not enough anti-particles to really do that. It would be more practical to view this as if they now had a spigot the shot out anti-particles in its stream but no reservoir to make it potable.

There are fine particles strewed across space that currently make the warp drive unrealistic as their impact with the ship would turn it into swiss cheese. Current models to accommodate these would use an electric field to polarize these particles and guide around the ship.

We have a loooonnnnggggg way to go (at least with public tech) before this is even considered a rational option.

Give it a while.

-FBB

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Thanks. The cost of "mining" antimatter is large, and well spent, as the money keeps very bright people employed and playing on the edge of known science. I'm not an expert on this topic, nor do I even want to play one on TV, so thank you and the other posters for expanding my knowledge (or is it anti-knowledge?).

I see a huge problem. Time. It's going to be a decade before any real research gets done on antimatter even with this discovery. ONE experiment on Earth can create and trap antimatter. We need to mass fund this to duplicate the lab. Every country should be spearheading an experiment to create antimatter. The picture shows a single room of equipment. We should be able to recreate the lab at multiple sites. Are there any places other than CERN that actually have the capabilities to create antimatter?

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Maybe the unsolved anti matter problem, has to do with spin and angular momentum? Also perhaps the fundamental forces, do they react the same to anti matter? In the beginning disproportionate 'quantity clusters' could have something to do with it, like (just to use pure numbers) 4 antimatters collide with 6 matters here, 10 matters collide with 9 anti matters there, could something like that be the case?

ChefSlug
I see a huge problem. Time. It's going to be a decade before any real research gets done on antimatter even with this discovery. ONE experiment on Earth can create and trap antimatter. We need to mass fund this to duplicate the lab. Every country should be spearheading an experiment to create antimatter. The picture shows a single room of equipment. We should be able to recreate the lab at multiple sites. Are there any places other than CERN that actually have the capabilities to create antimatter?

The LHC operated by CERN is the only one that is capable of producing it and trapping it currently if my memory serves me correctly.The LHC is contributed to by 21 countries and has a price tag of about 7 billion US$ to build..Operating costs just for the sheer amount of electricity it uses runs in the neighborhood of 25 million a year.And 1 billionth of a gram of antihydrogen costs a few 100 million to produce.


Also it doesn't really matter how much money we throw at this thing it's still gonna take significant time to do the experiments, analyze the data and then actually put it to use in applications.

Wondering how members of the public can help? You can help out with the simulations by contributing your computers spare processing power. here is a link