![]() ![]() ![]() When a particle meets its antiparticle pair, the resulting annihilation turns their masses into pure energy, as determined by Albert Einstein's equation, E=mc 2. Similarly, a proton and an antiproton are the same size and have the same mass, but have positive and negative charges respectively. An electron has a negative charge, whereas its antiparticle, the positron, has a positive charge, and both have an identical mass. Particles of matter and antimatter are identical, except for an opposite electrical charge. We're getting information about how they're behaving in the trap."Īntimatter was first postulated by the British physicist Paul Dirac in 1930 while working on a way to reconcile the ideas of quantum mechanics with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. With 38, that was difficult, but with 300 it starts to look like something you can make averages out of. "We've studied what's going on with these atoms while they're in the trap, how they're moving, what energy or velocity they have. Jeffrey Hangst of the University of Aarhus in Denmark, who led the experiments, said that the purpose of the study was to compare antimatter with atoms of normal matter. In their latest work, published in this month's edition of Nature Physics, they trapped 309 antihydrogen atoms for varying amounts of time up to 1,000 seconds (just over 16 minutes). ![]() The same scientists, based at the Alpha collaboration in Cern, were the first to trap antihydrogen last year when they created and held on to 38 atoms of the stuff for 172 milliseconds in a strong magnetic field. ![]()
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