Not sci-fi anymore: experts find way to hold antimatter

[rosie]

Here we go, finally there is movement into the next level! Very exciting news!
I know some people are nervous over this, but progress must be made to open the minds up to allow expansion of our thoughts, and boy, does this expand mine!

VANCOUVER — Antimatter fuelled the Starship Enterprise to go where no man had gone before, but in reality it remained strictly in the realm of science fiction.

Until now.

In an article published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists explain how that fiction may have taken a step closer to fact with the creation of a type of magnetic bottle that can hold antimatter long enough for scientists to try to unlock the mystery of the antiatom.

About 15 Canadian experts from Simon Fraser University, the University of B.C., the University of Calgary, York University and the TRIUMF national research lab in Vancouver were part of the 42-person team to make the discovery in Geneva.

The exciting device has the usually sedate scientific world in a froth.

"This is really cool," said Marcello Pavan, a physicist with TRIUMF. "We're talking about trapping antiatoms for goodness sakes, this is, you know, Star Trek."

Scientists have been creating antimatter for 15 years, but it moves at about the speed of light and is quickly destroyed. Pavan said the magnetic bottle is able to capture antimatter for about one-tenth of a second before it self-destructs.

"This is science fiction become science fact," he said in an interview Wednesday.

Antimatter is one of the mysteries of science.

Matter is essentially anything that has mass and occupies space -- basically everything on Earth.

It's believed matter and antimatter are identical, except that they have an opposite charge and antimatter destroys itself almost immediately.

Now that they can see antimatter, scientists might be able to answer some of the questions about any differences between the two.

Pavan said the amazing device may give some insight into what happened after the Big Bang created the universe.
more:
http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories...cience-101117/

[rosie]

Discover what antimatter is, where it is made, and how it is already part of our lives.

http://press.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/

[daledo]

GENEVA – Scientists may have been able to capture elusive atoms of antimatter, but don't expect that to lead to interstellar rocket engines or powerful bombs anytime soon — if ever.

Even as they announced the important advance in studying antimatter, they emphasized that science fiction uses of the stuff — like propelling the starship Enterprise in "Star Trek" or fueling a bomb in Dan Brown's book "Angels and Demons" — remain in the realm of the imagination.

International physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said they had overcome a basic problem in studying atoms of antimatter. While such atoms have been created routinely in the lab for years, they tend to disappear so fast that scientists don't have a chance to study them.

But in a report published online by the journal Nature, the scientists said they'd been able to trap individual atoms and keep them around for a bit more than one-tenth of a second.

To a particle physicist, that's a pretty long time.

"For us it's a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter," the team's spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, told The Associated Press on Thursday

Hangst and his colleagues, who included scientists from Britain, Brazil, Canada, Israel and the United States, trapped 38 anti-hydrogen atoms individually. Hangst says that since the experiments they reported in Nature, they've been able to hold on to the atoms even longer.

"Unfortunately I can't tell you how long, because we haven't published the number yet," Hangst told the AP. "But I can tell you that it's much, much longer than a tenth of a second. Within human comprehension on a real clock."

Studying such trapped atoms could help answer basic questions in physics, like why antimatter has disappeared from the natural universe while ordinary matter abounds in the stars, planets and galaxies. Theorists say both must have been created in equal amounts in the Big Bang.

Two teams had been competing to trap anti-hydrogen atoms at CERN, the world's largest physics lab best known for its $10 billion smasher, the Large Hadron Collider. The collider, built deep under the Swiss-French border, wasn't used for this experiment.

Hangst's team beat a rival group led by Harvard physicist Gerald Gabrielse, who nevertheless welcomed the result.

"The atoms that were trapped were not yet trapped very long and in a very usable number, but one has to crawl before you sprint," he told the AP.

To trap the anti-atoms inside an electromagnetic field and to stop them from annihilating ordinary atoms, researchers had to create anti-hydrogen at temperatures less than a half-degree above absolute zero.

Hangst played down speculation that antimatter might someday be harnessed as a source of energy or to create a powerful weapon like in "Angels and Demons."

"It would take longer than the age of the universe to make one gram of antimatter," he said, calling the process "a losing proposition because it takes much more energy to make antimatter than you get out of it."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_switzerland_antimatter

[shadowstalker]

"It would take longer than the age of the universe to make one gram of antimatter," he said, calling the process "a losing proposition because it takes much more energy to make antimatter than you get out of it."
Only by antiquated knowledge would this statement be true, but we know better right?

[HURRITT ENYETO]

Yeah im sure "we might not see it in our life times" but i bet the Military Industrial Complex will/does.

[sargeist]

Posted by HURRITT ENYETO (here)
Yeah im sure "we might not see it in our life times" but i bet the Military Industrial Complex will/does.

awesome. anti-matter warheads. now they can get to work mass producing those hell-class planetbusters.

[Lucrum]

Very cool indeed!

Now they could seriously start thinking about using the design that Michio Kaku explored in the series called Physics of the impossible.

(Let's just pretend for a moment that what we see is what we get )

Now, I want to see antimatter propulsion...NOT bombs...
(Now where did the wise old man smiley go, I'm sure I've seen him around here)

[Carmody]

To me, what it says is not that they've 'held' anti-matter..but that they've created an anti-particle complex spin state.... and managed to coherence it to stay together.

[Butangeld]

Sounds like they could do with a Rodin Coil over there in Geneva. Seriously, I always feel a sadness when I read what the mainstream science institutions are playing with. These people are for the most part brilliant minds and of a hard-working nature, but the academic institutions that (de)educated them nearly always seems to have left them with a mundane, funding safe, outlook.

I so much wanted for science to really deliver right up until I gave up hope around age 18, when it seemed that the more advanced theory became the more complex the solutions to the problems we wanted to solve became. Where there should be anti-gravity we have grown men bickering over their respective rights and academic authority to even pose a question. Where we should find cures to disease we find legislators and shoddy drugs trials.

Here we are an inch closer to being able to study anti-matter, which it is hoped will yield yet one more way in which to move things around, rather than checking out if there might be a useful way to pull things around.

If I'm correct in my interpretation of the Marko Rodin mathematical theory, then at the center of the vortex generated by one of his coils is a singularity, or quite simply a black hole. I'm with him and others that think it is easier to pull something around than to try to push it. How big would such a coil need to be before you could pull an aircraft carrier around?

Seems to me that this universe does not like anti-matter to stay in existence for very long. I suggest it is better to find ways to work with nature, rather than trying to force it to do what it resists.

[yaksuit]

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/eu...ter/index.html

part of a "disclosure" roll-out ?