Canadian scientists 'bottle' antimatter

MontrealGazette: Canadian scientists 'bottle' antimatter

Makoto Fujiwara has spent more than a decade in laboratories hunting an elusive prey, the stuff of science fiction — the missing half of everything.

He and other Canadian researchers have finally managed to trap their lightning in a bottle. Only it isn't lightning they've got in the bottle — it's antimatter.

In a paper appearing online Sunday in the journal Nature Physics, lead author Fujiwara and his colleagues say they've succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for more than 16 minutes — virtually an eternity for a rare substance that scientists have struggled to keep intact for more than a few fractions of a second.

"It's a kind of game-changer," said Fujiwara, a researcher at the Vancouver-based TRIUMF, a laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, and an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary.

Finally trapping antimatter for a prolonged period of time opens the door for researchers to do the kind of testing they hope could one day solve what's been described as one of the biggest mysteries of science.

The dominant theory for the creation of the universe holds that, when the cosmos got started at the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been produced in equal amounts.

But antimatter and matter annihilate each other on contact. If the early universe had equal amounts of matter and antimatter, they should have destroyed each other on contact, leaving nothing in the universe but light or other forms of energy.

Instead, the antimatter largely vanished, leaving scientists to puzzle over what happened to "the lost half" of the universe, as the researchers described it in a statement.

"It's related to our own existence," Fujiwara said. "There is, I think, a big desire to understand how it is that we came into existence, starting from the Big Bang."

Antimatter has long been a popular gimmick in fantastic fiction. It's the stuff that drives the faster-than-light engines of the starship Enterprise. Tom Hanks chased around a stolen canister of antimatter in the movie Angels and Demons.

But the opportunity to actually learn the properties of antimatter is an accomplishment researchers such as Fujiwara have been painstakingly trying to achieve for years.

"Nobody right now can explain why matter — everything that's around us, earth, sun, the galaxy — nobody knows how it is that we exist at all in the form of matter," Fujiwara said.

Anti-hydrogen atoms were first made in large quantities at a CERN laboratory eight years ago. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

They couldn't be stored, however, because whenever the anti-atoms touched the walls of a bottle — matter, in other words — the two substances would destroy one another. Because the antimatter came in such a small quantity, it did no visible damage to the bottles by annihilating their equivalent masses in matter.

The ALPHA team Fujiwara works with is made of up 40 researchers, 14 of them Canadian. They come from the University of British Columbia, the University of Calgary, Simon Fraser University and York University in Toronto.

They worked at the same facility that contains the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator — the machine some feared would destroy the world by creating microscopic black holes. (It didn't). The accelerator is buried underground beneath the border between France and Switzerland.

The team created a cylindrical container or "magnetic bottle" that is about five by 25 centimetres. It uses magnets to keep the anti-hydrogen atoms from touching its walls, suspending the antimatter atoms away from any matter that would cause their destruction.

"It has to be suspended in vacuum . . . you need a nearly perfect vacuum," Fujiwara said.

Now that they've sustained their anti-hydrogen atoms for 1,000 seconds, scientists can began to examine them and see how they compare to ordinary hydrogen atoms.

The first step likely will be subjecting them to microwaves to determine if they absorb exactly the same frequencies (or energies) as their matter twins.

Scientists want to know whether, as predicted, the laws of physics are the same for both matter and antimatter.