AUFORA - ANTIMATTER PRODUCTION AT FERMILAB

Friday, November 22nd, 1996
Source: AUFORA

ANTIMATTER PRODUCTION AT FERMILAB
from Nando Times (www.nando.net)

NEW YORK (Nov 22, 1996 01:36 a.m. EST) -- Physicists have generated antihydrogen in the world's most powerful particle collider, demonstrating that mass production of the bizarre antimatter atoms will likely be possible, Fermilab announced Thursday.

Encountered more often in science fiction than in real life, antimatter is nevertheless a real natural phenomenon. Every type of matter has an anti-matter counterpart, with opposite properties.

And just like in Star Trek, if a particle meets an antiparticle, they annihilate each other.

The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., began producing antihydrogen last week, and has made seven atoms of the antielement so far. Physicists consider the achievement a sign that mass production of antimatter atoms will be possible with further technological refinements.

"What we've demonstrated is, yes indeed, at this accelerator you can tag this stuff," said Charles Munger, a physicist at Fermilab. "The fact that it's so easy makes it practical to design harder experiments."

Although they've been making antiparticles for years, physicists have had a hard time pairing antiprotons and positrons, the antimatter versions of electrons, to make atoms.

"It's like trying to assemble a snowflake in a blast furnace," Munger said.

Physicists at Europe's CERN laboratory first achieved the feat in January by generating nine antihydrogen atoms. So Fermilab, as the Illinois accelerator lab is known, isn't breaking any new ground by being second to do it.

But in some ways Fermilab's achievement is more significant, Munger said, because the Illinois accelerator has greater potential to make thousands of antihydrogen atoms. Large numbers of the particles are needed to do the kinds of experiments that physicists would like to perform on antimatter atoms.

Most significant would be an experiment testing the behavior of antihydrogen atoms illuminated by a laser. When atoms of hydrogen are hit with a laser, they absorb energy and then give it up as light in a process similar to the one that makes neon signs glow.

Modern physics theories predict that antihydrogen should give off exactly the same color of light that its matter counterpart does. Physicists would like to do an experiment to make sure that's correct.

"It would be astonishing to everybody if it did not work," said Stanley Brodsky, a theoretical physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California.

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