Saturday, August 5, 2017

FIRST SPECTRAL FINGERPRINTS OF ANTIMATTER MAPPED OUT

Article Written By: Kyle Tam

 

 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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