Stable antimatter captured for the first time.

For a given value of stable before it collided and wiped itself out with normal matter.

Oooh, I'm excited . I just hope they don't blow anything up.

38 atoms isn't enough to blow anything up. [incredibly long diversion on Avogadro's number goes here]

Ooh exciting!

No, they've captured a stable antimatter atom for the first time. Stable means it won't decay and there is antimatter that doesn't decay and an antiproton which would be basically an antihydrogen ion would be relatively easy because loads of people are very good at trapping ions.

The "atom" is the important part of this release because the spectra of hydrogen atoms is well studied so if you get this time up longer you might be able to do some spectroscopy and then, I dunno, find something like the lamb shift not having an equivalent effect in anti-hydrogen, or hell we get lucky and its an even bigger effect then it might do something to explain the distressing lack of antimatter in the universe or break some previously held symmetry.

Of course, if that doesn't work, we might have to try bigger antiatoms or maybe an antimolecule. The better we get at trapper and manipulating (and if behaves the same up to a point then as our atoms trapping improves our antiatom trapping improves) we might get larger antimolecules. Imagine an antiamino acid. Fast forward a few hundred years and we've turn one of the moons of mars into a big trapping device so we can get anti-proteins to meet anti-proteins and we create anti-life, modelled by some improbably large equation.

edited 18th Nov '10 1:52:54 AM by SomeSortOfTroper

Imagine how big the research facilities would be. Creating and maintaining a magnetic field strong and flexible enough to contain a molecule of anti-water for example would require monstrous ammounts of energy. As everything else in particle physics really. Until we develop a more efficient source of energy i think a handful of particles at a time is all we're going to get. But still, considering that up until now they've only been able to capture antiprotons, postirons and other elementary anti-particles, capturing whole atoms of antimatter is pretty damn cool.

Man i love particle physics.

Darkseid approves of your Stealth Pun.

Awesome article. This will most likely lead to new discoveries in physics.

The version of the article I read took pains to point out that creating so much as a gram of antimatter under current methods would require more time than the universe has existed, so the people worried about scientists building photon torpedoes or blowing up the Earth can relax.

Under current methods, though.

Meaning, we might have a better way to do it in fifty years.

It would still be ridiculously inefficient though.

There's no way they'd displace conventional bombs in the foreseeable future.

edited 18th Nov '10 9:41:14 AM by storyyeller

Well it's great to be able to get anti-matter for studying stuff. Unless we find some magically cheap way of producing it though I'm not sure about applications for it but the understanding we get from producing anti-matter will likely lead to other useful discoveries.

Making antimatter like this is always going to take more energy than you put in because of the energy lost as heat. It'll always be easier to just drop a nuke.

edited 18th Nov '10 6:26:53 PM by Ponicalica

... please explain the Stealth Pun, Radical Taoist...

It's a comics joke.

Very interesting and very cool.

Does this mean that I get my antiparticle beams, antimatter reactors, and planet destroying explosives?

EDIT: Oh I forgot about FTL by bending spacetime.

EDIT 2: Did I mention that eventually we could turn it into an extremely powerful energy source?

edited 18th Nov '10 9:11:22 PM by uberdude

"Ha Ha Ha No."

No conservation of energy? E=mc squared. How do I get supertext on here?

It's not a power source, it would be a power store. An extremely dense one, but only a storage medium. Unless somebody rewrote some physical laws when I wasn't looking, you can't get more energy out of something you create than what you put in.

Use [[superscript:2

followed by closing it.

Someone made a theory which might theoretically allow efficient creation of antimatter. Unfortunately, it requires recreating the conditions of the Big Bang.

Power source, power store same thing to me.

Well they're not the same thing to most people.