141–150 of 188 posts
Why is there not a picture of the antimatter containment device? I hope it looks appropriately sci-fi.
Not really. https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take... Not even a cool new hazmat placard.
We could use UN 2910 or maybe UN 0357
Isn’t it dangerous to transport antimatter in a truck? What would happen if it got into a bad accident?
Hmm actually this particular truck will go slower than one full of oranges so you have a better chance of survival.
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Also, the amount of antimatter storable in a Penning Trap is limited such that its mass energy is comparable to the stored magnetic energy of the trap, which is small compared to the energy released by the same mass (as of the trap) of high explosives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma (see discussion of the "Brillouin Limit")
Make an antimatter liquid with strong intra-molecular bonds (e.g. anti-H2O) that is only slightly ionized. That would be easier to contain magnetically.
Reading this makes me so happy! Even if it by itself might not be the biggest science news, we know about antimatter for a long time and we are still talking about a few atoms only, but the news that people are actually handling antimatter to the point of transporting it with a truck, just feels a bit like sci-fi actually happening.
I agree, news like this make me optimistic too!
> If the delivery can be made successfully—and it appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work—the new facility in Germany should allow measurements with a precision of over 100 times better than anything that has been achieved at CERN. Hmm. It sounds good until you realize that's two decimal places. Two decimal places is a pretty marginal gain for a lot of work.
There are a few properties of other particles with like 8 decimal places calculated theoretically and measured experimentally, and they are useful to validate the current standard model.
Actually, we expect some very very tiny asymmetry between matter and antimatter, but no one has measured that. I'm not sure how it would be visible in antiprotons. Perhaps a very tiny difference in the magnetic moment. Perhaps in the 17th digit that we will never measure. [1]
In any case it's interesting to confirm that our current models are correct or not.
[1] I'm not an expert in this area, but IIRC the problem is something like there is a little chance that the antiproton emits a photon that creates a electron and a positron, then it use the week force to transform into a muon that use the weak force to transform into a tauon that use the weak force to transform into an electron that colides with the original positron that was not doing nothing interesting meanwhile. Nobody is sure if all this transformations introduces a complex phase (a complex number of modulo 1) that cause a difference when you start with a antiproton instead of a proton. So, if there is a difference, it's probably something weird with a lot of intermediate virtual particles that cause a tiny difference in the 17th digit, or perhaps in the 1326th digit.
Not sure why, but I found it amusing when they said that the antimatter "reached speeds of over 40 km/hour." Not sure what the speeds are at the point of its creation (there are knowledgeable folks on here who will know, I'm sure), but that must seem sloooooow in comparison.
That will be the speed of light for you. Not exactly the speed of light, but 0.999... with a few 9's.
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I worked at CERN a few years ago, so assuming they haven't build any new amazing facilities, these would be my top picks: - Any of the experiments really, but especially ATLAS is impressive. - The antimatter factory. I found that the guides there are usually very passionate. - The control centre if you can get a tour (this is the facility I delivered software to).
I work for the control group at another accelerator, so we were visiting and meeting their control guys. Super friendly people all of them, they treated us like kings... and their control centre is bigger than our whole facility xD
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Not bad for a cat, nice work. Clearly you don't work in the cybernetics division.
Not technically a cat. Evolved from the ships cat.
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That's awesome. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting CERN too. Curious, what part of the visit stood out as especially impressive? Last I checked, there was a pretty long waiting list for tours.
If you want to visit Atlas (control room) or CERN’s first accelerator (a synchrocyclotron) just show up in the morning when the visitor center opens. The tour guides are often passionate scientists. The museum is worth visiting, you’ll get to see the first www server (Tim-Berner Lee’s nextcube). The live shows are well put together. And everything is pretty much free of charge. The only thing I can think of that has…
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> The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive. Also the persistence that is required because of the low "return on investment" is staggering. Another article linked from this one said: > The authors had to mix 10 million positrons with 700 million antiprotons in order to get get 38 certifiable antihydrogen events.
> picograms I needed to know how much antimatter weighed and this article seemed helpful (though I am poorly placed to know if it’s correct). https://gizmodo.com/how-much-does-antimatter-weigh-492195828
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10533407/
The interesting idea behind it is basically that for antimatter a potential wall, imagine a step function which is 0 for negative and 1 for positive and a wave that hits the wall from the negative to the positives, in theory it cannot propagate in the wall, turns out that one solution can propagate in that wall and that's antimatter: It basically sees the potential as inverted.
So since people were thinking about that they started considering that if it happens for EM interaction it could be the case for gravitation, that lead to wonder if the antimatter had different properties in that department.
From a pure theory point of view the mass of the particles and anti particles should be identical but they might have "fallen up" instead of falling down.
Note that if there are significant differences this would be extremely interesting but I am not deep enough into exotic theories that take into account those exotic cases to make more statements about the matter.