Sorry, I meant to put this in Quark's and I don't know how to move it.

What did that particle do to deserve months in isolation? :(

The trapped positron vowed vengeance upon humanity and became Lore.

This is actually really exciting! I fucking love anti-matter, always been fascinated by it.

If anti-matter can exist, why is our universe made of matter? This is the Baryon Asymmetry question that this research seeks to answer. The team has proven they can isolate a single positron. The next step is to measure it to as much accuracy as they have with the electron. Perhaps they will find differences!

Summer '25 CERN showed that anti-matter baryons (protons, neutrons, etc) decay differently - link. So there's a good chance they might find something!

Would love to actually see anti-matter but that's a long way off. Really hope anti-matter likes to stick together and we could actually build atoms out of it. Would be crazy to study the properties of anti-water! Maybe that's just science fiction. In any case, very excited for the coming research!

how did this get past the ethics committee

Poor particle did nothing bad

I wonder if it likes one scientist over another scientist

Not gonna be impressed until they teach it to fetch.

I wonder what they called it,since they tamed it.

I'm thinking Anton if it's a boy particle, Antonia if it's a girl, and Matty if it's nonbinary.

Perhaps Antti (Niemi) if it's Finnish 🤷🏻

So it's potty trained and can do tricks now?

If movies have taught me anything, that particle isn’t tame. It’s just waiting for it’s moment.

Your move antimatter

Antimatter matters!

-"Free Anti Matt Er!"

How did they know at any given point that it was still there? Wouldn’t they have to interact with it to be sure, causing an explosion and annihilating it? The explosion would be incredibly small with just one particle. Is the lack of explosion their only evidence that they had contained it? I’m stumped as to what it actually means to have one particle like this. How can you even know what temperature it is without interacting with it? And how do you interact with it without destroying it?

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.

For someone knowing jack about this matter^huehue

How big would be the "explosion" if it would touch matter?

Edit: Thanks for all the explaining without ridiculing my absence of knowledge.

Did they ask for consent?

Penning traps have been around for decades.

What does near absolute zero mean for a single quantum particle?

Edit:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/491213

My rough understanding is that the particle was kept in a non-eigenstate (e.g. laser perturbed eigen state or some perturbed state), and the temperature is defined as the /beta derived as the thermal weight there real world state vs the eigen states (see link).

Scientists in 2026: “let’s see how long we can hold onto this extremely angry piece of energy that is absolutely incompatible with our known existence and stability by every metric up until now. It’s probably gonna work, it might not go boom.”