BBC:
The ALPHA collaboration at CERN has succeeded in trapping
anti-hydrogen atoms for
more than 15
minutes. That is a significant improvement on the team's
efforts reported last year, writes the BBC's Jonathan Amos.
Laboratories such as CERN can make antimatter; the difficulty
up to now has been retaining the material for longer than a
fraction of a second, as it is eliminated on contact with
"normal" matter. The ALPHA team developed a "magnetic bottle,"
which uses magnetic fields and cooling techniques to keep the
anti-hydrogen atoms at half a degree above absolute zero. That
gives the trapped atoms time to return from the excited state
in which they're produced to their normal state. The next step
for the group is to use microwaves to probe anti-hydrogen's
structure and to see how they behave in normal gravitational
fields.
