The CERN already has the first cubit of antimatter

Antimatter is fascinating not only for its essence; It is also due to the still enigmatic role that he played in The origin of the universe. Scientists still do not have the necessary tools to understand the role of this form of matter with some precision In the formation of the cosmos and the mechanisms that govern the faint line that delimits the imbalance between matter and antimatter. Fortunately what they know are their constituent elements and some of their properties.

Understand What is antimatter It is not difficult. And we can observe it as an exotic type of matter that is constituted by antiparticles, which are particles with the same mass and spin as the particles with which we are familiar, but with opposite electric charge. In this way the antiparticle of the electron is the positron or antielectron. And the proton antiparticle is the antiproton.

The CERN has taken a step forward in the understanding of antimatter

The antimatter has a surprising property: when they come into direct contact with the matter, both are annihilated, releasing a large amount of energy in the form of high-energy photons, as well as other possible particle-antiparticle pairs. It is currently being studied in much of the research centers specialized in physics of most important particles in the world in the hope that knowing it better helps us understand some of the mysteries of the cosmos that remain out of our reach.

The CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), the particle physics laboratory hosted in the vicinity of Geneva and next to the border between Switzerland and France, has the necessary resources for produce and manipulate antimatter. Two of the experiments that have already delivered important results to the physicists who work in them are Gbar (Gravitational behaviour of antimatter at rest) and alpha-g (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Aparatus-Gravity).

However, the authentic protagonist of this article is the base experiment (Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment). It has been designed with the purpose of measuring with the maximum possible precision the fundamental properties of antiprotones, such as their load-mandy relationship or intrinsic magnetic moment. The problem is that to carry out these measures with great precision it is essential to cool these particles to less than 200 millikelvins. Cooling antiprotones until they reach such a low temperature is difficult, but CERN physicists know how to do it.

The problem is that so far the device that was responsible for carrying out this process of extreme freezing needed to invest no less than 15 hours to cool an antiproton, and this period of time degraded the accuracy of the measures. Fortunately, physicists and CERN engineers They have devised a new device that is capable of carrying out This same task in just 8 minutes. It is surprising, but this technology allows in 8 minutes to achieve the same in which the previous technique invested 15 hours.

Thanks to some extent to this innovation, base physicists have managed to maintain an antiproton oscillating between two different quantum states for almost a complete minute while they had it caught. It is amazing. In practice, what they have achieved is to put an antimatter a cubit, although we are still far from having the necessary technology for make a quantum computer able to bring together several of these cubits. Even so, this achievement is very important for a reason: from now on it will allow the physicists of the base experiment to carry out measurements of the antiproton moment with a precision between 10 and 100 times higher.

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