Angels and Demons , a bestselling book and popular movie, describes the theft of “trapped antimatter.” Not specified is whether what is trapped is the charged antimatter particles that my colleagues and I are proud to have first trapped at CERN or the neutral antimatter atoms that we hope to soon trap. In the story, sinister folks threaten to annihilate the trapped antimatter to blow up the Vatican and the cardinals assembled there to select a pope. The same distorted lens with which author Dan Brown disfigured the Roman Catholic Church in The Da Vinci Code was focused on our cold antiproton and antihydrogen research program in Angels and Demons. Brown made his millions untroubled by the fact that the simultaneous annihilation of all the antiprotons ever made would not release enough energy to boil a pot of tea. The movie’s camera zooms in on a part of CERN where...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
1 March 2010
March 01 2010
Slow antihydrogen
The quest to precisely compare cold antihydrogen and hydrogen atoms should enable physicists to test our understanding of one of reality’s fundamental symmetries.
Physics Today 63 (3), 68–69 (2010);