(Originally published in The Peak on June 13, 2011)
It sounds like the stuff of Star Trek and Dan Brown novels, but a team of Canadian researchers, including SFU physics PhD student Mohammad Dehghani Ashkezari and his supervisor Mike Hayden have arrested atomic antimatter, and managed to keep it for an entire 16 minutes.
“Even though scientists have now been producing antihydrogen atoms for about 15 years, no one has ever managed to hang on to them. Within a tiny fraction of a second, the newly produced antimatter atoms collide with some ordinary matter and disappear in a flash,” Hayden explained. “We’ve managed to create a complicated magnetic bottle in which the antimatter can be stored, without ever touching the walls.”
Ashkezari and Hayden are part of a team that includes collaboration from three other Canadian universities — UBC, the University of Calgary, and York University — as well as the Canadian research laboratory TRIUMF. These institutions are the Canadian component, which make up about one third of the ALPHA collaboration, which is based at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. Other countries that contribute to the team are Brazil, Denmark, Israel, Japan, and the U.K.
Antihydrogen is artificially produced by combining antiprotons and positrons, the antimatter counterparts of protons and electrons, respectively. The ALPHA team came up with a way to mix and trap these antiparticles much more efficiently.
Although the team had previously figured out a way to trap antihydrogen atoms in November of last year, the longest they were able to contain them was approximately 200 milliseconds, or less than a fifth of a second. They have now managed to lengthen that time to more than 1,000 seconds.
“This remarkable step forward will open the doors to a very precise and confident comparison of antihydrogens and hydrogens, as a comparison between antimatter and matter,” Ashkezari told The Peak.
“I call it a game changer,” said, Makoto Fujiwara, lead author of the study. He explained that the difficulty lies in keeping the antimatter in existence; the moment it touches matter, both are destroyed, creating pure energy in the process. With that obstacle out of the way, researchers are that much closer to being able to study the properties of antimatter.
“SFU has the leading role in microwave spectroscopy of trapped antihydrogens, which is one of the main goals of the ALPHA collaboration,” said Ashkezari.
Although the research may not provide any science fiction weapons technologies or large scale energy manufacturing, the researchers assert that studying the properties of antihydrogen and comparisons between antihydrogen and hydrogen could potentially provide answers to some of the most fundamental and difficult questions in the field of physics.
