Antimatter Atoms Trapped for First Time—"A Big Deal"

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101118-antimatter-trapped-engines-bombs-nature-science-cern

Antimatter Atoms Trapped for First Time—"A Big Deal"
But no applications for bombs, energy sources, or engines.
November 18, 2010

For the first time, scientists have trapped antimatter atoms — mysterious, oppositely charged versions of ordinary atoms — a new study says.

Though the achievement is "a big deal," it doesn't mean the antimatter bombs and engines of science fiction will be igniting anytime soon, experts say.

But the feat, undertaken a couple of months ago at the Geneva, Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), paves the way to the potential solution of a fundamental cosmic conundrum.

Theories predict that antimatter particles and matter particles have opposite electrical charges but are otherwise nearly identical. Whenever the matter and antimatter meet, they self-annihilate in a shower of pure energy.

Yet for all the similarities, scientists think matter and antimatter must differ in some other fundamental way. That's because, even though matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts during the big bang, the universe we know is made almost entirely of matter.

"It's a central mystery in physics," said Joel Fajans, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the new study, published today in the journal Nature.

The unprecedented trapping of antimatter atoms for study is a key step toward understanding why nature seems to abhor antimatter. (Read about a new material that may help explain why matter and antimatter are out of balance.)

Cliff Surko, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, called the trapping of antimatter atoms "a big deal."

"This is the next step, and it's a key next step" toward solving that central mystery, said Surko, who did not participate in the research. "It's a relief to have this step in hand."

Antimatter Bonding Activities

For the new experiments, the team used CERN's ALPHA experiment, a tangle of corrugated pipes, electromagnetic "bottles," and other equipment.

First, scientists had to create antiprotons and antielectrons, or positrons, and get them to bond. This formed atoms of antihydrogen, the simplest antimatter element—a feat first achieved in 2002 at CERN.

To make the antiprotons, the team took some of the protons normally used to feed CERN's nearby Large Hadron Collider, smashed them into metal targets, and captured the byproducts. The positrons were captured from a radioactive sodium source.

To get the antiprotons and positrons to bond, the team used an oscillating electric field, nudging the antiprotons into the same energy level as the positrons.

Next came the hard—and unprecedented—part: getting the antimatter particles to sit still.

Aiming for Permanent Antimatter-Atom Incarceration

The major challenge of trapping antimatter is that, once created, the particles are typically too hot and energetic to be trapped.

Fajans likens the task of antihydrogen trapping to games that involve tilting a toy disk to roll a ball bearing into a dimple or hole.

"If the ball is moving too fast, it won't stick in the dimple," Fajans said. "That was our problem with antihydrogen atoms. They were moving too fast to stay stuck in the traps we were making for them."

To slow them down, the team used a series of electric and magnetic fields to cool the antimatter.

Of the millions of antihydrogen atoms the ALPHA team created, only about 38 were cold enough—and slow enough—to be held in a kind of "magnetic bowl" that prevented them from interacting with normal matter.

Because the experiments were intended only to prove that antimatter atoms could be trapped, the team let the antihydrogen atoms go after only two-tenths of a second. But they hope to drastically increase the incarceration time in future experiments.

"Two-tenths of a second is nice, but forever is even better," Fajans said.

And forever may not be so far away. Since the experiments covered in the Nature study, the researchers have created many more antihydrogen atoms and held them for much longer—fodder for a future report.

According to Fajans, "We're doing much better now."

If more antihydrogen atoms can be produced and trapped for longer periods, scientists might finally be able to study them in enough detail to explain their scarcity in our universe, he added.

No Antimatter Bombs?

John Bollinger, of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, agreed that the new results represent a major step forward—with caveats.

"It is a big deal," said Bollinger, who didn't take part in the experiment, "but more big deals need to be achieved before precise studies can be made—for example, extending the lifetime of the trapped antihydrogen and identifying the state ... of the antihydrogen."

As for real-world antimatter applications, UC San Diego's Surko said that the harnessing of antimatter as an energy source—say, for use in weapons or a Star Trek-style propulsion system—remains a far-fetched idea.

"The problem is that ... it takes so much more energy to make than you get out that it's pretty inefficient," he said. "And you have to go to great lengths to confine it for a long time."

NIST's Bollinger was likewise skeptical. "The amount of antimatter that can be trapped is very small," he said.

"Even if the efficiency of the trapping process is increased, it is fundamentally limited by the amount of antiprotons that can be generated. Therefore I do not see applications in terms of new energy sources or weapons."

'Angels & Demons' tour illuminates Rome

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2009-05-14-rome-angels-and-demons-tour_N.htm

'Angels & Demons' tour illuminates the charms of Rome
By Chris Gray Faust, USA TODAY
5-14-9

VATICAN CITY — The faithful stream into St. Peter's Square on Christianity's holiest day, engulfing the Egyptian obelisk that centers the piazza so carefully planned by 17th-century sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Stern despite their colorful striped uniforms, members of the Swiss Guards direct those in the Easter crowd fortunate enough to procure free tickets to chairs, while others stand, waiting for a glimpse of papal pomp.

It's a scene that could be taken straight out of Angels & Demons, author Dan Brown's best-selling prequel to the hugely successful — and highly controversial — novel The Da Vinci Code. Just like that book, Angels & Demons has been made into a movie starring Tom Hanks as symbologist Robert Langdon, which opens today around the world.

Set in Vatican City and Rome, Angels & Demons pits Langdon (paired with an intelligent and attractive female sidekick, Vittoria Vetra) against a modern incarnation of an ancient foe of the Roman Catholic Church, the Illuminati. In the book, Catholics fill St. Peter's Square, awaiting the announcement of Il Conclave, the assembly of cardinals charged with selecting a new pope. Little do they know they are sitting atop a time bomb — and that four cardinals in line for the job are being murdered at sites around Rome.

It's not a tale you'd expect the Catholic Church to embrace. And indeed, several prominent religious leaders — including Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights president Bill Donohue— have come out against the film (although the church itself has not issued a boycott call).

No matter. Catholic indignation did nothing to stop The Da Vinci Code movie from grossing more than $758 million in 2006.

And it did nothing to stop Sony Pictures from shooting key scenes of the movie in Rome, which will only enhance the city's allure for Angels & Demons fans. Among the sites from the book that will be seen on film: the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Castel Sant'Angelo and its Pasetto di Borga, the secret passageway that connects the fortress with the Vatican.

The Vatican itself is not on film, nor are the interiors of two churches prominently featured in the book, Santa Maria del Popolo or Santa Maria della Vittoria; the Rome diocese said last summer that it had banned filming there because of the movie's themes. Reggia di Caserta, an 18th-century royal palace outside Naples and south of Rome, stood in for the Vatican in some scenes (and an elaborate replica was built on a Los Angeles studio lot).

Executive producer Todd Hallowell says the production didn't bother asking permission to film at the Vatican, as the church never grants it. He promises that viewers will feel as if they are within the Vatican, even if the church itself wasn't crazy about the filming.

Says Hallowell: "Given the fact that The Da Vinci Code was perhaps not their favorite movie, the concept of a sequel being shot in their backyard was not the best news they had all week."

Mapping out the book

On the steps outside Santa Maria del Popolo — the site of the book's first element-themed murder, Earth— about 30 people gather for Angels & Demons guided tours. While the operating company, Angelsanddemons.it, bills it as "the official Angels & Demons tour," several tour operators in Rome offer a similar version.

The group is split, and guide Graham Hannaford, 26, passes out a map of Rome, a replica of the one from Angels & Demons. Fewer than half the people on Hannaford's tour have read the book, but he carries it with him for reference (and occasionally, to debunk the poetic license that Brown sometimes took with Roman geography).

The first stop on the "Path of Illumination" that Brown has devised through Rome is the Chigi Chapel inside the church. Designed by Renaissance master Raphael and filled with sculptures by Bernini — the baroque wunderkind whom Brown cheekily portrays as a secret Illuminati mastermind — the Chapel is an artistic masterpiece, albeit one that might fall lower on a typical tourist itinerary.

Subsequent stops in the four-hour tour call at Roman sites both familiar and off-the-beaten-track: St. Peter's Square, the gloriously elaborate Santa Maria della Vittoria and the always-hopping Piazza Navona, sites of the book's Air, Fire and Water murders, respectively. It concludes at the imposing Castel Sant'Angelo, where the Hassassin in Brown's book keeps Vittoria captive in an alleged ancient Illuminati lair.

Jennifer Carroll, 32, of French Settlement, La., takes pictures at nearly every stop.

"My book club will kill me if I don't," she says.

Carroll and her husband, Basil, attended the papal Easter Mass and bought rosaries for family at the Vatican, including one for their daughter to use at her First Communion. Carroll had some friends who felt The Da Vinci Code was anti-Catholic and others who felt the murders in Angels & Demons were too violent. But the controversy has been overblown, she says.

"It's fiction, it's OK," she says. "You could get offended by just about anything if you wanted to."

Hannaford calls for a coffee break next to the Pantheon. With Roman tourism down, the Napa, Calif., native had questioned returning after Christmas, but he figured the release of Angels & Demons could trigger the same bump in visitors that Paris received from The Da Vinci Code.

The tour is not the company's best seller — visitors tend to hire guides to the immense Vatican Museum more often, Hannaford says. But he thinks that Angels & Demons provides a good road map to Rome's charms.

"The book does capture the spirit of Rome," he says. "There are a lot of chaotic things going on, but it all pulls together."

Seeing the story

Of course, visitors don't have to take a guided tour to see the parts of Rome explored in Angels & Demons. But some sites do require planning ahead.

Such is the case with the Vatican Scavi, the necropolis under St. Peter's Basilica said to contain the grave of Peter, the founder of the Christian church. In the book, Langdon chases the camerlengo (played by Ewan McGregor in the film) through the subterranean passages to find the hidden canister of dangerous antimatter.

In real life, the Vatican Excavations Office carefully controls the number of people allowed to walk through the Scavi. Only 12 people are allowed through at a time, with a limit of 250 visitors a day. Travel agents and tour guides are not allowed to buy tickets; visitors must petition through e-mail or fax months ahead of time to secure a spot.

The machinations are well worth it. Undertaken in 1939 through 1950, the excavations unearthed pagan and early Christian tombs from a cemetery that existed on the site before Constantine built the original St. Peter's Basilica around 322. The corridors between the tombs are narrow and uneven, and the air is slightly dank. But what you'll see are remarkably well-preserved frescoes and mosaics that provide a glimpse into the time when Christianity was a religious newcomer.

Back above ground, a Vatican trip is not complete without visiting the Sistine Chapel, although doing so requires negotiating the crowded Vatican Museums. With the masses of people snapping photos of Michelangelo's famed ceiling, it's hard to imagine the Sistine Chapel as a quiet place of deliberation. But this is where Il Conclave chooses papal succession, broadcasting their results through smoke from a chimney brought in for the occasion.

A better job of crowd control takes place at the Galleria Borghese, where visitors are limited to two-hour time blocks. While the museum — set amid leafy Villa Borghese, Rome's version of Central Park— is not referenced in Angels & Demons, it's a must-stop for readers who are curious about Bernini's other works. Some of his most famous pieces are here, including The Rape of Proserpina, his determined David and Truth Unveiled by Time, created for himself.

The latter sculpture was composed when Bernini — a papal darling who not only designed the colonnades of St. Peter's Square but also came up with the idea for the 10 angels guarding Ponte Sant'Angelo, the bridge between Rome and Vatican City — was out of favor. Could it be that during this time, as Brown suggests, Bernini joined disgruntled intellectuals such as Galileo in the Illuminati ranks?

Vatican tour guide Joseph Mancinelli dismisses such speculation. "It is just a story, it has nothing to do with Christianity," he says of Angels & Demons. "You must believe what is true, not what people say in a story."

Follow Chris Gray Faust at twitter.com/CAroundTheWorld.

IF YOU GO

Getting there: Rome's main airport, Leonardo da Vinci, is known by its old name, Fiumicino. The Leonardo Express runs shuttles to Rome's Termini rail station every 30 minutes ($15, trenitalia.com). Taxis or car service to and from the airport costs about $60.

Lodging: The Westin Excelsior Rome is offering a two-night Angels & Demons package that includes a private or group movie tour, as well as 20% off at the hotel's restaurants and bars. The promotion starts at $444 a night and runs through 2010 (westin.com/angelsanddemons.com). The venerable Hotel Hassler at the top of the Spanish Steps also has a three-night package that includes a tour starting at $2,323 (hotelhassler.com). Or live like the fictional Robert Langdon, who stayed at Hotel Bernini on Plaza Barberini (Bernini's Triton fountain is right in front). Rates start at $395 (berninibristol.com).

Generally, a cheaper way to stay in Rome is to rent an apartment through a service such as venere.com. The Beehive, with dorm beds starting at $34 and private rooms at $109, is the No. 1-ranked budget hotel on Trip Advisor (the-beehive.com).

Dining: Rome's better restaurants are in alleys away from main tourist streets. Near the Pantheon, try the pasta at Osteria del Sostegno (primi, $8-$11, secondi, $12-$20). Osteria dell'Angelo, about 10 minutes from the Vatican on Via G. Bettolo, has an outstanding version of the Roman classic spaghetti carbonara at similar prices. Do as the Romans do and enjoy an evening gelato; Gelataria della Palma, also near the Pantheon, has 100-plus flavors.

Tours: The "Official Angels & Demons Tour" is four hours and includes some bus transport, $76 (angelsanddemons.it). To book tickets to the Vatican Scavi, e-mail the Excavations Office several months in advance; the visit costs $14 (scavi@fsp.va). Advance tickets to Vatican Museums can be purchased online for $19 (mv.vatican.va); private companies such as Context Rome also have tours with art historians (contexttravel.com/rome). The Galleria Borghese requires advance reservations for its two-hour blocks for $12 (ticketeria.it).

Information: en.turismoroma.it

The Truth About Angels, Demons and Antimatter

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520193,00.html

The Truth About Angels, Demons and Antimatter
Thursday, May 14, 2009
By Jeremy Hsu

An antimatter explosion threatens to level the Vatican in the movie adaptation of the thriller "Angels and Demons," but real-world physicists are unfazed by this plot.

The story features "Da Vinci Code" hero Robert Langdon racing to recover an antimatter capsule stolen from the CERN particle physics facility in Switzerland. Researchers first figured out how to create and trap antimatter particles at CERN, which gave author Dan Brown the inspiration for his story.

One physicist doesn't find CERN's unexpected publicity from the story upsetting. On the contrary, he's rather pleased.

"I always say that what Dan Brown did for the Roman Catholic Church in 'The Da Vinci Code,' he did for me and my research with 'Angels and Demons,'" said Gerald Gabrielse, a Harvard physicist who currently leads an international research team at CERN.

Antimatter is real, but it still represents a baffling presence in the universe – sub-atomic particles that are the opposite of normal matter. When a particle and antiparticle meet, they mutually annihilate each other and release their entire mass as energy.

This bizarre but intriguing reality has prompted plenty of science fiction writers to dream of antimatter engines powering future civilizations or starships, such as Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise.

"Angels and Demons" twists that dream of untapped energy into more of a nightmarish scenario, by suggesting what might happen if a relatively large amount of antimatter annihilated itself with matter all at once. A quarter of a gram of antimatter threatens to unleash the power of 5,000 tons of TNT and destroy everything within a half-mile radius – or so goes the fictional story.

The reality is that physicists can only wish they had so much of the stuff.

"If you take all the antimatter produced in the history of the world and annihilated it all at once, you wouldn't have enough energy to boil a cup of tea," Gabrielse told LiveScience.

Antimatter represents a rare entity in a universe dominated by matter, and scientists still struggle to understand why. What they do know is that creating antimatter requires tremendous effort, such as using particle accelerators at CERN to smash together particles at nearly the speed of light.

An occasional antimatter particle may arise naturally when a cosmic ray strikes Earth's upper atmosphere. But collecting man-made antimatter particles is much more practical for research.

Physicists have only slowed and trapped a small fraction of all the produced particles, in this case known as antiprotons. They use antimatter traps somewhat similar in concept to what "Angels and Demons" describes, with magnetic fields keeping the antimatter particles in a vacuum away from any matter.

"You need a container with no walls, that's the idea," Gabrielse noted. His former project, known as TRAP, successfully created and held charged antiprotons for months.

Now physicists face the more daunting challenge of capturing neutral antihydrogen atoms. The newer international effort, called ATRAP, has put together an antihydrogen trap and is working on a second.

"We are trying right now to trap neutral antihydrogen atoms which we have produced, but no one has succeeded in proving that they've been trapped yet," Gabrielse said.

Such neutral antihydrogen atoms could theoretically be clumped together, whereas charged antiprotons are repelled by each other. Whether an antimatter clump would annihilate with all the power of a small nuke without blowing itself apart remains an open question – and that still assumes physicists can create and collect anything close to a quarter of a gram of antimatter.

One part of "Angels and Demons" may have come true, although unrelated to antimatter. The fictional plot includes retinal scanners guarding a CERN lab, and the real-life CERN happened to adopt such eyeball security after the book came out, Gabrielse explained.

So the plot of "Angels and Demons" doesn't quite annihilate upon contact with reality, but the real-life mystery of antimatter may still trump fiction.

"Why the universe is made out of more matter than antimatter? We don't know the answer to that question at all," Gabrielse said.

Source of Mysterious Antimatter Found

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080111-antimatter-space.html

Source of Mysterious Antimatter Found
Charles Q. Choi
Special to SPACE.com
Fri Jan 11, 2008

Antimatter, which annihilates matter upon contact, seems to be rare in the universe. Still, for decades, scientists had clues that a vast cloud of antimatter lurked in space, but they did not know where it came from.

The mysterious source of this antimatter has now been discovered — stars getting ripped apart by neutron stars and black holes.

While antimatter propulsion systems are so far the stuff of science fiction, antimatter is very real.

What it is

All elementary particles, such as protons and electrons, have antimatter counterparts with the same mass but the opposite charge. For instance, the antimatter opposite of an electron, known as a positron, is positively charged.

When a particle meets its antiparticle, they destroy each other, releasing a burst of energy such as gamma rays. In 1978, gamma ray detectors flown on balloons detected a type of gamma ray emerging from space that is known to be emitted when electrons collide with positrons — meaning there was antimatter in space.

"It was quite a surprise back then to discover part of the universe was made of antimatter," researcher Gerry Skinner, an astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told SPACE.com.

These gamma rays apparently came from a cloud of antimatter roughly 10,000 light-years across surrounding our galaxy's core. This giant cloud shines brightly with gamma rays, with about the energy of 10,000 suns.

What exactly generated the antimatter was a mystery for the following decades. Suspects have included everything from exploding stars to dark matter.

Now, an international research team looking over four years of data from the European Space Agency's International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) satellite has pinpointed the apparent culprits. Their new findings suggest these positrons originate mainly from stars getting devoured by black holes and neutron stars.

As a black hole or neutron star destroys a star, tremendous amounts of radiation are released. Just as electrons and positrons emit the tell-tale gamma rays upon annihilation, so too can gamma rays combine to form electrons and positrons, providing the mechanism for the creation of the antimatter cloud, scientists think.

Billions and billions

The researchers calculate that a relatively ordinary star getting torn apart by a black hole or neutron star orbiting around it — a so-called "low mass X-ray binary" — could spew on the order of one hundred thousand billion billion billion billion positrons (a 1 followed by 41 zeroes) per second. These could account for a great deal of the antimatter that scientists have inferred, reducing or potentially eliminating the need for exotic explanations such as ones involving dark matter.

"Simple estimates suggest that about half and possibly all the antimatter is coming from X-ray binaries," said researcher Georg Weidenspointner of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

Now that they have witnessed the death of antimatter, the scientists hope to see its birth.

"It would be interesting if black holes produced more matter than neutron stars, or vice versa, although it's too early to say one way or the other right now," Skinner explained. "It can be surprisingly hard to tell the difference between an X-ray binaries that hold black holes and neutron stars."

Weidenspointner, Skinner and their colleagues, detailed their findings in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Nature.