The simplest way to avoid this problem is to slow the atoms down, which means cooling them. In a high-energy environment, this process will turn what should be a sharp peak at a specific wavelength into an imprecise blur that doesn't give us useful answers. Any motion by the atoms being studied will typically cause the photon to be red- or blue-shifted relative to its actual value. That information is what the researchers were after.ĭoing these measurements presented a significant challenge, however, and not just because of the tendency of matter and antimatter to annihilate each other. The energy of the emitted photons provides information about the interactions between the antiproton and the atomic nucleus. And just like an electron, the antiproton can shift between orbitals by absorbing or emitting a photon. From the perspective of the nucleus, the antiproton looks a lot like a morbidly obese electron: it will occupy orbitals with precise energies around the nucleus but with a different shape from those occupied by the electron. As it's the opposite of a proton, it has a negative charge. In this case, the antimatter was an antiproton. Finally, the specific interactions here-between an atomic nucleus and an object in the orbitals that surround it-are sensitive to properties that are fundamental to the Universe. In addition, this system involves interactions between antimatter and regular matter, which can be difficult to capture due to their violent ends. For one, the measurements will be sensitive to the properties of antimatter and strange quarks, which are short-lived and are often created in environments that make precision measurements challenging. There are many reasons you'd want to get precise measurements of this sort of thing. The researchers then measured the light emitted by the antiproton's orbital transitions.
A small research team managed to put an antiproton in orbit around the nucleus of a helium atom that was part of some liquid helium chilled down to where it acted as a superfluid. The work is likely to be useful, as we still don't understand the asymmetry that has allowed matter to be the dominant form in our Universe.īut the study is probably most notable for the surprising way that it collected measurements. In Wednesday's issue of Nature, a new paper describes a potentially useful way of measuring the interactions between normal matter and exotic particles, like antiprotons and unstable items like kaons or elements containing a strange quark.
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