Laser helps unlock antimatter secrets

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38366963

Laser helps unlock antimatter secrets

By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website

19 December 2016
From the section Science & Environment

Scientists at Cern have found a new way to unlock the secrets of antimatter. In a major technological advance, physicists shone a laser on trapped anti-atoms to detect whether they behaved any differently to atoms.

The work could shed light on one of the enduring mysteries about antimatter. Although the Big Bang produced matter and antimatter in equal amounts, today, the Universe overwhelmingly consists of matter - and current theories cannot explain why.

Antimatter is incredibly difficult to produce and then capture and hold on to - not least because it gets annihilated on contact with ordinary matter. But by using a specially-designed magnetic trap, researchers working on Cern's Alpha experiment near Geneva, Switzerland, were able to study properties of anti-hydrogen - the antimatter form of hydrogen.

"The context is to see whether matter and antimatter obey the same laws of physics, which is required by the Standard Model," Prof Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for Alpha, told the BBC News website. The Standard Model is the theory drawn up to describe the fundamental building blocks of the Universe and the forces between them.
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Writing in Nature journal, the Alpha team reports the first ever measurement of how antihydrogen responds to laser light at a precisely tuned frequency. "We've tried to shine the same "colour" of light, if you will, on an antihydrogen atom that we would use for hydrogen, to see if it responds in the same way. The answer so far is yes," said Prof Hangst. The team found no differences in how antihydrogen behaved compared with ordinary hydrogen, a result that's perfectly in line with the Standard Model.
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