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CERN scientists cool antimatter with lasers for the first time
By Michael Irving
April 05, 2021
Scientists at CERN have used lasers to cool down antimatter for the first time. The milestone could help unlock some of the secrets of this weird substance, including why it didn’t annihilate the universe soon after the Big Bang.
Unlike the elusive dark matter, antimatter is a bit more tangible to us, having been isolated, produced and examined in recent years. Essentially, it’s just normal matter with the opposite electric charge, which means that if antimatter and matter so much as touch, they annihilate each other in a burst of energy.
That of course makes it tricky to store and transport, let alone study. Over the last decade or so, CERN scientists have developed better and better containers that use electromagnetism to keep antimatter suspended in a vacuum for longer periods of time, from fractions of a second, to several minutes, to well over a year.
That’s allowed scientists to study the stuff in a variety of ways, such as its spectrum and how it reacts to gravity. The main goal of all this is to investigate whether electric charge is the only difference between matter and antimatter.
More:
https://newatlas.com/physics/antimatter-laser-cooling-cern/
