Are there any unexpected differences between matter and antimatter? The international
ALPHA collaboration has taken an important step toward answering that question by constructing an apparatus at CERN that can confine freshly made atoms of antihydrogen, the bound state of an antiproton and a positron, for nearly 0.2 seconds—long enough for the antimatter to be examined spectroscopically. A hot plasma of roughly 10
4 antiprotons—produced by slamming 26-GeV protons into a metal target—is cooled and introduced into one end of the apparatus, while about 10
6 low-energy positrons from the decay of radioactive sodium are introduced into the other. Electric fields gently nudge the charged species together in the heart of the device, pictured here, where they mix at cryogenic temperatures and form antihydrogen. If their kinetic energies are low enough—in temperature units, less than 0.5 K—the antihydrogen atoms are held in the grip of a superconducting octupole magnet and solenoidal “mirror” coils that together interact with the atoms’ magnetic moments. When the magnetic fields are abruptly turned off, the atoms are released and their spatial distribution captured by a three-layer silicon detector, which locates the atoms’ annihilations and distinguishes them from events triggered by lone antiprotons and stray cosmic rays. In 335 trial runs, the researchers confirmed that 38 antihydrogen atoms had survived in the trap for at least 172 ms. Although the trapping rate per atom produced is low—about 10
−5—the achievement sets the stage for precision spectroscopy and antihydrogen tests of fundamental symmetries and gravitation. (G. B. Andresen et al.,
Nature 468, 673, 2010.)—R. Mark Wilson
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