Creating matter's strange cousin antimatter is tricky, but holding onto it is even trickier. Now scientists are working on a new device that may be able to trap antimatter long enough to study it.
Antimatter is like a mirror image of matter. For every matter particle (say an electron, for example), a matching antimatter particle is thought to exist (in this case, a positron) with the same mass, but an opposite charge.
The problem is that whenever antimatter comes into contact with regular matter, the two annihilate. So any container or bottle made of matter that attempts to capture antimatter inside would be instantly destroyed, along with the precious antimatter sample one tried to put inside the bottle.
Physicist Clifford Surko of the University of California, San Diego is hard at work to overcome that issue. He and his colleagues are building what they call the world's largest trap for low-energy positrons – a device they say will be able to store more than a trillion antimatter particles at once.
The key is using magnetic and electric fields, instead of matter, to construct the walls of an antimatter "bottle."
"We are now working to accumulate trillions of positrons or more in a novel 'multicell' trap – an array of magnetic bottles akin to a hotel with many rooms, with each room containing tens of billions of antiparticles," Surko said in a statement.
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Antimatter is like a mirror image of matter. For every matter particle (say an electron, for example), a matching antimatter particle is thought to exist (in this case, a positron) with the same mass, but an opposite charge.
The problem is that whenever antimatter comes into contact with regular matter, the two annihilate. So any container or bottle made of matter that attempts to capture antimatter inside would be instantly destroyed, along with the precious antimatter sample one tried to put inside the bottle.
Physicist Clifford Surko of the University of California, San Diego is hard at work to overcome that issue. He and his colleagues are building what they call the world's largest trap for low-energy positrons – a device they say will be able to store more than a trillion antimatter particles at once.
The key is using magnetic and electric fields, instead of matter, to construct the walls of an antimatter "bottle."
"We are now working to accumulate trillions of positrons or more in a novel 'multicell' trap – an array of magnetic bottles akin to a hotel with many rooms, with each room containing tens of billions of antiparticles," Surko said in a statement.
Read full Go to Home
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