Particle physicists at CERN in Switzerland have found the answer to one of the great mysteries of physics: How does antimatter fall?
It’s the first-ever observation of free-falling antimatter, which proved that atoms of antihydrogen are pulled downward due to gravity, as their matter equivalents.
Wait. What’s anti-hydrogen?
Well, that’s a positron orbiting an antiproton. Positrons are positively charged electrons and antiprotons are basically negatively charged protons.
To understand all that sub-atomic phenomenon, we need to take a quick trip to the exotic and explosive world of antimatter.
We learned at school that everything we see around us is made up of matter. All matter consists of atoms, which in turn, consist of protons, neutrons and electrons.
Antimatter is matter’s evil twin. Its particles share the same mass as their matter counterparts, but qualities such as their electric charge are opposite. And this makes it explosive. When any matter comes into contact with antimatter, they annihilate each other, releasing all the energy stored inside them.
Remember the antimatter explosion scene of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons – when a little bit of the stuff blew up over Vatican City? The science depicted in the movie is based on fact.
It doesn’t sound like antimatter can be real, but it does exist in the universe. The good news is that there is not much antimatter to be found around our planet to annihilate our existence.
However, physicists at CERN have been making it at the Antimatter Factory for some time now, to study this elusive and most expensive substance on Earth.
[One gram of antimatter may cost about $62.5 trillion, that’s around ₹5,000 billion]
So, what’s new?
Particle physicists found that antihydrogen atoms, released from the magnetic confinement in CERN’s ALPHA-g apparatus, behave consistent with gravitational attraction to the Earth.
The successful experiment will now allow precision analysis of the magnitude of gravitational acceleration between anti-atoms and the Earth, to test the weak equivalence principle of the general theory of relativity.
“It has taken us 30 years to learn how to make this anti-atom, to hold on to it, and to control it well enough that we could actually drop it in a way that it would be sensitive to the force of gravity. The next step is to measure the acceleration as precisely as we can,” says Jeffrey Hangst, ALPHA researcher & spokesperson, CERN
This ‘proof-of-principle experiment’ by ALPHA researchers at CERN is a confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which postulates that all masses, irrespective of differences in their internal structures, react to gravity in a similar manner.
CERN’s Antimatter Factory is a unique facility in the world for producing and studying antimatter. The experiments at this facility are aimed at measuring with high precision the gravitational acceleration of atomic antimatter.
[Business Standard]
