As you may have already heard, or you may already know a lot about it (whether your a physicist, technician or enthusiast), Antimatter has been captured for the first time. It has been created artificially in experiments.
I already knew about the discovery and capture, and know a lot about the physics behind it, however I wanted to inform and educate you all on the subject.
Please note, some of the quotes and statistics come from http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/large-hadron-collider-traps-antimatter/story-fn5fsgyc-1225956290864 and other sources, while most of it comes from me. I will cite these sources correctly.
Antimatter is the opposite of matter and is annihilated when it comes into contact with matter and vice versa. Instead of an electron, it has a positron (also called an antielectron-but I prefer positron). A positron has the opposite elementary charge to an electron. Instead of a proton it has an antiproton which also has the opposite elementary charge to a proton. Then there is the antineutron which has an elementary charge of 0 (like a neutron).
Now that the basic (and I mean basic) structure of an antimatter atom has been explained, we can get on to the story.
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have trapped 38 atoms of antihydrogen for 0.166 seconds using incredibly powerful magnetic fields. [1]
"We’ve been able to trap about 38 atoms, which is an incredibly small amount, nothing like what we would need to power Star Trek’s starship Enterprise or even to heat a cup of coffee,"Robert Thompson, Head of Physics and Astronomy, University of Calgary said. [1]
Now this may seem like nothing, but that is incredible, this means with the huge amounts of data collected, that we can confirm what we are theorising and/or discover completely new ideas and theories.
For Star Trek fans (like myself) the whole concept of a warp drive revolves around anitmatter. Matter (deuterium) and anitmatter (antideuterium) are injected in to the core by powerful containments fields (magnetic fields to control the particle flow) and collide releasing vast quantities of energy (gamma rays, X-rays, etc.). This powers the warp nacelles and generates a "warp field" and warps spacetime in that field to propel the vessel at FTL velocities.
A paper from the study was published in well known peer-reviewed, scientific journal Nature. [1]
That paper involved cooling negatively charged antiprotons and compressing them into a cold cloud of positrons.[1]
This possibly involves Bose-Einstein condensate temperatures.
“Understanding antimatter will hopefully enable us to shed light on why almost everything in the known universe consists of matter,"Micheal Charlton, University of Swansea said.[1]
Footnotes:
[1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/large-hadron-collider-traps-antimatter/story-fn5fsgyc-1225956290864
