Physicists
led by Canadian researchers under the ALPHA Collaboration have mapped
out the structure of antihydrogen, hydrogen's antimatter equivalent,
through spectroscopy. This comes only after nine months since a team at
CERN succeeded in measuring the spectrum of light emitted by
antihydrogen.
To manage this feat, the ALPHA Collaboration
cranked up CERN's Antiproton Decelerator to produce 90,000 antiprotons.
Along with 1.6 million positrons, the researchers managed to make about
25,000 antihydrogen atoms. Out of all these antimatter particles, the
team managed to trap only 194 atoms in a special force field to keep
them from touching 'normal' matter and instead blast them with
microwaves to observe their varying reactions.
Not too surprising, it
was found that antihydrogen's spectral lines are identical to those of
hydrogen. Had this been even slightly different, this would have posed a
major problem to the Standard Model of physics which predicts that all
particles have a twin (e.g. electron & positron, proton &
antiproton). This discovery rules out the possibility that the structure
of antimatter might have something to do with why the Universe is made
out of matter and not antimatter.
Read more about this fascinating story at: http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-captured-the-first-spectral-fingerprints-of-antimatter
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Saturday, August 5, 2017
FIRST SPECTRAL FINGERPRINTS OF ANTIMATTER MAPPED OUT
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