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Scientists trap and tame a single particle of antimatter for months (news.northwestern.edu)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Man the two things I would have liked from the article is how much total energy did this cost to do. Im guessing if it was up scaled it should not cost much more than doing a single particle although I guess more magnetic power do to gravity. Then also it does not say why it only lasted that long. Did they intentionally stop or did something stop working and a particle of regular matter managed to touch it.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (7 children)

    This is just a guess but i reckon they got the data they needed from the experiment so they chose to end it. This is one step in a larger body of work. One of the team members has measured the magnetic moment of the electron extremely precisely and wants to do the same with a positron. I believe this experiment was to show they can capture and manipulate a positron for an extended period of time. Now they can move on to the real measurements!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    Im not so sure. creating antimatter is not trivial. if they could keep it contained indefinately at little cost it would be kept to use with other experiments. Maybe that is why its stopped. To be used with another experiment. I just would like to know why and what its final dispensation was.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    A positron gets created by radioactive decay. Certainly the process to make an appropriate isotope (Sodium 22) is not trivial but the creation anti-matter will just happen.

    Capturing it and storing it is the hard part which the team proved they can do. As they were working with a single positron and have developed the procedure for capturing one there is no reason to keep it for further experiments.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    so again. if the energy used to capture is trivial to the energy used to contain. I want to know that. What im really looking for is the practicality of long term storage.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (3 children)

    Ah sorry i get you! Yeah like how long could we go? Indefinitely?

    Looking at the photo the equipment does seem quite large, it takes up the whole room. Can say for sure they don't have the funding to dedicate that much equipment to a static experiment.

    Do agree with you though. Would be interesting to see the numbers for long term storage.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    yeah and you might be on to something. they might already have ideas to reduce the size or complexity and might follow up using a different design. I have been involved in a lot of projects with a large and ugly prototype to prove some stuff and then greater effort is put into design once they know the idea works.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Aw yeah for sure they could make it more compact! Would love to see it. If we could actually make meaningful quantities of anti-matter. Could we use it for power? What would transport look like? Anti-matter is one of my favourite subjects lol

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Once we unlock antimatter-fueled propulsion we could send a probe to the Proxima Centauri system.

    If we try sending one now, even if it escapes the sun's gravity well, it would easily be passed by a future probe if antimatter propulsion is invented within the next century or so.

    Once the probe reaches the system, it would take a little over a decade for a radio signal to reach us. So it would need some built-in automation to run research missions because the latency is just too high for remote control from Earth. Unless some sort of quantum entanglement technology enables instantaneous communication, but that might just be scifi...

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