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Breakthrough gives rare glimpse

A tiny crack in the door to an alternate universe has been wedged open a bit wider.

A tiny crack in the door to an alternate universe has been wedged open a bit wider.

Canadian and international scientists have announced a major breakthrough in their ability to capture and store minuscule particles of antimatter, the mysterious substance described as a mirror image of everyday reality. It lies at the heart of the most fundamental questions in physics.

“I call this a game-changer,” said Makoto Fujiwara, a University of Calgary scientist and the lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature Physics.

“The antimatter world is some sort of mirror world,” he said. “We’re really peeking. There’s so many things were thought of as science fiction that we can seriously consider scientifically studying them. We’re really excited about this.”

Fujiwara and 40 other physicists from eight countries working at the Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, say they have been able to hold on to atoms of antihydrogen — the antimatter counterpart to regular hydrogen — and do so for nearly 6,000 times longer than the previous record. The team, which includes researchers from five Canadian universities and research institutions, has also been able to catch eight times as much antihydrogen as before.

“It will really provide us with an opportunity to measure different properties of antimatter very precisely,” Fujiwara said. “You can think of a lot of studies that were not even imaginable before.”

Physicists believe that when the universe was created about 14 billion years ago, as postulated in the big bang theory, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts. But the universe now contains almost no trace of antimatter and scientists want to know what happened to it all.

“It’s one of the fundamental questions of physics and astronomy: what happened to antimatter?” Fujiwara said.

Scientists at CERN, one of the world’s largest and best-equipped facilities for physics research, were first able to create antimatter in 2002 by smacking atomic particles together at near light speeds. But matter and antimatter annihilate each other in a burst of energy when they come in contact, so researchers couldn’t keep the antimatter around.

Last November, a “magnetic bottle” without physical walls enabled them to create and store antimatter for the first time — 38 atoms of antihydrogen for about 0.17 seconds.

Now, technical improvements and refinements have allowed them to catch 308 atoms and store them for more than 16 minutes. Fujiwara said scientists may be able to stretch that out even longer.

The added time gives researchers a much greater ability to study the characteristics of antimatter — things as basic as its colour and how it reacts to gravity. “We don’t know if antimatter falls down or falls up.”