A team of particle physicists at CERN's Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) have trapped 309 atoms of antimatter for more than a quarter of an hour.
When CERN first created and trapped antimatter, back in November 2010, researchers held onto the fleeting antihydrogen atoms for just 170 milliseconds, or a tenth of a second.
Antihydrogen atoms have a super short life span. As soon as they come into contact with normal hydrogen atoms the antimatter is annihilated. The team at ALPHA figured out how to isolate the atoms and hold a cloud of them in a magnetic field, but it released the antimatter after a confinement time of just 172 ms.
Now the team has repeated the experiment, but kept the atoms trapped in the magnetic snare for 1,000 seconds -- just under 17 minutes.
"A critical question for future studies is: how long can anti-atoms be trapped?" asks Makoto Fujiwara on the paper's abstract. "Here we report the observation of anti-atom confinement for 1000 seconds, extending our earlier results by nearly four orders of magnitude."
Extending the life of antimatter will give researchers at CERN the opportunity to uncover further secrets of the mysterious atoms. "These advances open up a range of experimental possibilities," says Fujiwara, "including precision studies of CPT [Charge, Parity, and Time Reversal] symmetry".
Even more excitingly, the lab's particle physicists have plans for upcoming tests that will determine whether antimatter plays by gravity's rules, or whether they're truly "anti" in every definition. The ALPHA team plans to freeze a small lump of antihydrogen, and watch what happens.
If it falls up, we might be seeing the first step towards turning anti-gravity sci-fi into a reality. CERN is determined to test this within the next couple of months.
