Antimatter News - SciTechDaily

Matter vs. Antimatter: New CERN Experiment Challenges Conventional Physics

Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 08:24:35 +0000

The BASE team at CERN has enhanced antiproton cooling techniques, allowing quicker and more precise measurements that challenge existing theories of matter-antimatter symmetry, potentially reshaping our understanding of the universe’s composition. Why does the universe contain matter and virtually no antimatter? The BASE international research collaboration at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in [...]

Freezing Positronium Atoms With Lasers To Unlock Secrets of Antimatter

Politecnico di Milano — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 17:09:05 +0000

Researchers successfully cooled positronium atoms, significantly impacting antimatter research and enabling new experiments in quantum electrodynamics and the potential for an antimatter Bose-Einstein condensate. The international AEgIS (Antimatter Experiment: gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) collaboration at CERN, in which Prof. Giovanni Consolati of the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology participates on behalf of the Politecnico di [...]

Landmark CERN Experiment Reveals: If You Dropped Antimatter, Would It Fall Down or Up?

National Science Foundation — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 22:39:18 +0000

Landmark CERN experiment may help explain why antimatter seemingly lost out in the early universe. If you dropped antimatter, would it fall down or up? In a unique laboratory experiment, researchers have now observed the downward path taken by individual atoms of antihydrogen, providing a definitive answer: antimatter falls down. In confirming antimatter and regular [...]

Antimatter Levitation Debunked: Groundbreaking CERN Experiment Reveals Gravity’s Pull on Antihydrogen

University of California - Berkeley — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 08:30:52 +0000

Experiment at CERN eliminates the possibility that antimatter is repulsed by gravity. CERN’s ALPHA collaboration has experimentally confirmed that antihydrogen is pulled down by gravity, negating the concept of antimatter levitation and aligning with Einstein’s general relativity theory. For those still holding out hope that antimatter levitates rather than falls in a gravitational field, like [...]

Cracking One of the Universe’s Biggest Mysteries: “The Most Precise Measurement Yet” of Electron’s Permanent Electric Dipole Moment

American Association for the Advancement of Science — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 03:18:55 +0000

A recent study, which holds significant implications for addressing one of the most important unresolved questions in physics—the disparity between matter and antimatter in the universe—presents “the most precise measurement to date” of the electron’s permanent electric dipole moment. This matter-antimatter imbalance can be accounted for through the breaking of charge parity symmetry. The standard [...]

Electron Asymmetry and the Mystery of Matter’s Existence: A Record-Breaking Study

National Institute of Standards and Technology — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 08:17:30 +0000

JILA physicists make record-breaking measurement of a key electron property. In the first moments of our universe, countless numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons formed alongside their antimatter counterparts. As the universe expanded and cooled, almost all these matter and antimatter particles met and annihilated each other, leaving only photons, or flashes of light, in [...]

Scientists Discover First Evidence of Symmetry Violation – And It Could Explain Why You Exist

University of Florida — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 01:22:15 +0000

Parity symmetry violation detected in the orientation of galactic formations could explain the abundance of matter. For generations, physicists were confident that the laws of physics were perfectly symmetric. Until they weren’t. The notion of symmetry is neat and appealing, but it crumbles under the chaotic reality of our universe. In fact, from the 1960s [...]

Unraveling a Cosmic Antimatter Mystery

University of California - Riverside — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 19:33:37 +0000

Physicists invoke the cosmological collider to demonstrate why matter, not antimatter, dominates the universe. The universe was filled with equal numbers of matter and “antimatter” – particles that are matter counterparts but have opposite charges — early in its existence, shortly after the Big Bang. The universe then cooled as space expanded. Today’s universe is filled [...]

Are There Anti-Stars (Made of Antimatter) Around Us?

IRAP — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 08:37:35 +0000

Are there anti-stars around us? Answer from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. What if some of the antimatter that was thought to have disappeared was lurking around us in the form of anti-stars? Scientists from the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP – CNRS/CNES/UT3 Paul Sabatier) are using the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope [...]

Antiprotons in Superfluid: Hybrid Antimatter-Matter Atom Behaves in Unexpected Way

Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics — Sat, 21 May 2022 17:35:33 +0000

A team of scientists at CERN led by MPQ physicist Masaki Hori discovered that a hybrid antimatter-matter atom behaves in an unexpected way when immersed in superfluid helium. The result may open a new way for antimatter to be used to investigate the properties of condensed matter, or to search for antimatter in cosmic rays. [...]

41-Million-Pixel Vertex Locator May Unlock Some of the Most Enduring Mysteries of the Universe

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) — Mon, 16 May 2022 10:33:35 +0000

The device hopes to answer the ultimate existential questions. The final piece of an all-new detector has completed the first leg of its journey toward unlocking some of the most enduring mysteries of the Universe. The 41-million-pixel Vertex Locator (VELO) was assembled at the University of Liverpool. It was assembled from components made at different [...]

Large Hadron Collider Reveals Secret of Antimatter Creation in Cosmic Collisions

CERN — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 17:31:13 +0000

Recently at the Quark Matter conference and before that at the Rencontres de Moriond conference, the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration presented an analysis of particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that may help determine whether or not any antimatter seen by experiments in space originates from the dark matter that holds galaxies such as the Milky [...]

Tiny Star Unleashes Monstrous Beam of Matter and Anti-Matter

Chandra X-ray Observatory — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 04:52:58 +0000

A city-sized collapsed star has generated a beam of matter and antimatter that stretches for trillions of miles. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed the full extent of this beam, or filament. This discovery could help explain the presence of positrons detected throughout the Milky Way galaxy and here on Earth. Positrons are the [...]

Unexpected Behavior of Hybrid Matter–Antimatter Atoms in Superfluid Helium Surprises Physicists at CERN

CERN — Sun, 27 Mar 2022 02:56:27 +0000

The result may open doors to several lines of research in particle physics and beyond. A hybrid matter–antimatter helium atom containing an antiproton, the proton’s antimatter equivalent, in place of an electron has an unexpected response to laser light when immersed in superfluid helium, reports the ASACUSA collaboration at CERN. The result, described in a [...]

Largest Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Observed at Large Hadron Collider

Piotr Traczyk, CERN — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 11:48:29 +0000

New results from the LHCb experiment on CP asymmetry in charmless three-body charged B meson decays include the largest CP asymmetry ever observed. CP asymmetry is the only non-trivial difference between matter and antimatter found so far. Its discovery in neutral kaon decays in 1964 came as a big surprise to the physics community, but [...]

Tiny Star Unleashes Gargantuan Beam of Matter and Anti-Matter That Stretches for 40 Trillion Miles

Chandra X-ray Center — Sat, 19 Mar 2022 09:40:06 +0000

Astronomers have imaged a beam of matter and antimatter that is 40 trillion miles long with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The record-breaking beam is powered by a pulsar, a rapidly rotating collapsed star with a strong magnetic field. With its tremendous scale, this beam may help explain the surprisingly large numbers of positrons, the antimatter [...]

Cosmic Physics Breakthrough: Scientists Produce Particle-Antiparticle Pairs From a Vacuum

University of Manchester — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 19:00:17 +0000

The University of Manchester team observed the Schwinger effect in graphene, a process thought to require cosmic-level fields, by creating strong electric fields in a lab setup. This experiment also uncovered a new phenomenon where electrons exceeded graphene’s speed limits, hinting at new charge carrier generation. The findings have potential applications in future quantum material-based [...]

Unexpected Substructures in the Fundamental Components of All Matter

American Physical Society — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 19:00:14 +0000

Quarks and Antiquarks at High Momentum Shake the Foundations of Visible Matter Jefferson Lab and Fermilab experiments present new results on nucleon structure. Two independent studies have illuminated unexpected substructures in the fundamental components of all matter. Preliminary results using a novel tagging method could explain the origin of the longstanding nuclear paradox known as [...]

Scientists Generate Matter Directly From Light – Physics Phenomena Predicted More Than 80 Years Ago

Brookhaven National Laboratory — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 18:32:23 +0000

Collisions of Light Produce Matter and Antimatter From Pure Energy Study demonstrates a long-predicted process for generating matter directly from light — plus evidence that magnetism can bend polarized photons along different paths in a vacuum. Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user [...]

MIT Physicists Find New Clues to Why There’s So Little Antimatter in the Universe

Jennifer Chu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 09:16:36 +0000

Radioactive molecules are sensitive to subtle nuclear phenomena and might help physicists probe the violation of the most fundamental symmetries of nature. Imagine a dust particle in a storm cloud, and you can get an idea of a neutron’s insignificance compared to the magnitude of the molecule it inhabits. But just as a dust mote [...]

Subatomic Particle Seen Changing to Antiparticle and Back for the First Time in Extraordinary Experiment

University of Warwick — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 00:22:06 +0000

A team of physicists, including the University of Warwick, have proved that a subatomic particle can switch into its antiparticle alter-ego and back again, in a new discovery just revealed last week. “This new result shows for the first time that charm mesons can oscillate between the two states.” An extraordinarily precise measurement made by [...]

Antimatter: Scientists Trap Elusive Material by Blasting It With Lasers

Niels Madsen, Swansea University — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 17:13:26 +0000

Antimatter is believed to play a huge part in the story of our universe. It’s the counterpart to matter: identical in every way – with protons, neutrons and electrons – but with an opposite electric charge. According to our best understanding of the laws of physics, the universe of today should be equally populated by [...]

CERN Scientists Successfully Laser-Cool Antimatter for the First Time

Swansea University — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 11:48:45 +0000

The result opens the door to considerably more precise studies of the response of antimatter to light and how it behaves under the influence of gravity. Swansea University physicists, as leading members of the ALPHA collaboration at CERN, have demonstrated laser cooling of antihydrogen atoms for the first time. The groundbreaking achievement produces colder antimatter [...]

World’s First Laser-Based Manipulation of Antimatter (The Otherworldly Counterpart to Matter)

TRIUMF — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 15:00:26 +0000

Researchers with the CERN-based ALPHA collaboration have announced the world’s first laser-based manipulation of antimatter, leveraging a made-in-Canada laser system to cool a sample of antimatter down to near absolute zero. The achievement, detailed in an article published today (March 31, 2021) and featured on the cover of the journal Nature, will significantly alter the [...]