A method for laser-cooling magnetically trapped antihydrogen atoms to temperatures of about 20 millikelvin has been proposed by a team of researchers from Canada and the US.
The team claims that cooling the antihydrogen would make it much more stable and so easier to study in experiments. In particular, it could lead to better spectroscopic analysis of antihydrogen, so that its properties can be compared with those of hydrogen.
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| An artist's concept showing a trapped anithydrogen atom being released after 1000 seconds. The new proposal allows for such trapped antimatter to be laser cooled and then studied. (Courtesy: Chukman So/CERN) |
Antihydrogen is an atomic bound state of a positron and antiproton that was first produced at CERN in 1995. Over the past few years, physicists working on the ALPHA experiment at the Geneva lab became the first to capture and store a significant amount of the stuff, holding a total of 309 antihydrogen atoms for 1000 seconds in 2011. In early 2012 the team then showed that it is possible to probe the internal structure of an antihydrogen atom by carrying out the first tentative measurements of the antihydrogen spectrum. By improving such measurements, researchers hope to determine what structural differences, if any, antimatter has compared with ordinary matter.
This, they hope, could eventually explain why the universe currently contains much more matter than antimatter.
Physics World: Lasers could chill antihydrogen
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