Ever wondered what antimatter looks like ? Well , wonder no more , as scientists have managed to get a coup d’oeil of it in optical visible radiation for the first fourth dimension – and , well , it looks a lot like even matter .
The research took place at the ALPHA experimentation inside CERN , the finish of which has been to look at the similarity and difference between thing and antimatter . The inquiry was write in the journalNature .
In this experimentation , scientist used a optical maser to measure antihydrogen , the antimatter twin to atomic number 1 . Antimatter is notoriously hard to study because , by its nature , it is destroyed in the blink of an middle , so a sophisticated magnetised trap was used to make it potential .
“ Using a laser to note a conversion in antihydrogen and comparing it to hydrogen to see if they obey the same laws of aperient has always been a key goal of antimatter research , ” enjoin Jeffrey Hangst , representative of the ALPHA coaction , in astatement .
CERN said this experiment was the first time the light spectrum of topic and antimatter had ever been compared . Interestingly , both atomic number 1 and antihydrogen were found to have identical brightness spectrums – a prognostication made by the Standard Model of particle physics . The divergence between them , though , is that atomic number 1 is made of an electron and a proton , while antihydrogen is made of a antielectron and antiproton .
To make antihydrogen for the experimentation , scientists mixed a plasm of about 90,000 antiprotons with positron , produce 25,000 antihydrogen atoms per try . About 14 of these could be pin down in the experimentation , and by shining them with a laser beam at a accurate frequency , the interaction of the irradiation and the antihydrogen could be measured .
“ Moving and trammel antiprotons or positrons is easy because they are charged particle , ” bestow Hangst . “ But when you combine the two you get achromatic antihydrogen , which is far more hard to immobilize , so we have designed a very special magnetized trap that relies on the fact that antihydrogen is a little bit magnetised . ”
Now , the scientists are hoping to make o.k. measuring of antimatter , in the hope of solving one of the universe ’s biggest mysteries – namely , why matter far outweighs that amount of antimatter in the universe , despite both being thought to have been created in equal amounts in the Big Bang .
