At Issue—”The Most Fundamental Theories of Nature”

In case you missed it, in the last year, science has come a lot closer to understanding antimatter.

That's thanks to work being done at that place in Geneva, Switzerland where they use things like the Large Hadron Collider to study things like the Big Bang and the irreducible fundamentals of existence.

The big antimatter news—reported, with a lot of supporting algorithms in the June issue of the journal Nature Physics—is that a team at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, has been able to capture and hold antihydrogen atoms for as long as 10 minutes.

“Showing that we can hold the antihydrogen for more than 10 minutes and increasing the production rate vastly expands the types of experiments we will be able to perform, ” says Auburn University physics professor Francis Robicheaux, who is part of an international team of scientists, known as ALPHA, who made this scientific breakthrough. “This makes it much more likely that we will be successful in measuring the fundamental properties of the antihydrogen atoms. The most fundamental theories of nature make specific predictions about these properties, and even the smallest discrepancies would overturn them.”

Robicheaux serves as a theorist to the ALPHA team, providing computer simulations of how mirror-trapped anti-protons might mimic anti-atom annihilations, and how actual anti-hydrogen would behave in the trap. 

- Sponsor -

By Chris McFadyen

The latest Alabama business news delivered to your inbox