Antimatter is tied to one of the world’s greatest mysteries. Physics predicts that when we create matter, we also create an equal amount of antimatter. However, there appears to be almost no antimatter in our universe, and this fact has long puzzled physicists.
Now, physicists from Simon Fraser University, the University of Calgary, TRIUMF, the University of British Columbia, York University, British Columbia Institute of Technology, and research institutions around the world have answered the age-old question. A deeper understanding of antimatter: Does antimatter fall or not?
A collaboration with the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Antihydrogen Laser Physics Instrument (ALPHA) at CERN has completed the first direct measurement of the influence of gravity on the motion of antimatter using the new ALPHA-g instrument.
The new results confirm that antimatter does indeed fall downward, as many in the scientific community had predicted. This is an amazing scientific and technological achievement that represents a breakthrough in the world of antimatter research.of collaboration The survey results are published in Nature this week.
“Science fiction is full of fantastical depictions of antigravity, with many objects and devices blocking gravity or mysteriously falling upwards. But what happens in the real world?” said Michael Hayden, SFU professor emeritus of physics, a member of the ALPHA collaboration. “It’s no surprise that it’s taken us this long to get here. Gravity is the weakest force we know, and at the atomic scale it is completely suppressed by electrical and magnetic interactions. It looks small.”
Hayden’s expertise in magnetic fields, microwaves, and magnetic resonance experiments played a key role in confining antimatter within the instruments used in the experiment, allowing scientists to actually observe the effects of gravity on antimatter for the first time. I accomplished it.
“Our focus at SFU was to characterize these magnetic fields as accurately and quickly as possible,” he says. “Although we started focusing on nuclear magnetic resonance probes a decade ago, the real bread and butter of this paper is the advanced electron cyclotron resonance experiments performed using microwaves and a trapped electron plasma. It turns out that there is.”
ALPHA has previously carried out precise measurements of the charge of antihydrogen and the frequencies of its most important spectral lines, which so far match those of normal hydrogen. This new measurement is the first to perform precise measurements of the gravitational properties of antimatter and determine whether antimatter falls in exactly the same way as matter.
What’s next? Hayden says this is really just the beginning.
It took more than a decade to plan, design, and build the equipment and develop the technology to perform this experiment, but Hayden and his ALPHA collaborators were able to determine as precisely as possible the gravitational interactions between matter and antimatter. I would like to measure it.
“The next step is to cool the antiatoms with a laser, slowing them down and making them more sensitive to gravitational interactions,” he says.
