First, they were able to hold onto elusive antimatter atoms, and now they are manipulating them with microwaves, opening the door for potential discoveries into how the universe formed.
An SFU student and his supervising professor are part of the international team that is using microwaves to peer into antihydrogen atoms for the first time ever.
Mohammad Ashkezari, a PhD physics student, and his professor Mike Hayden are part of Alpha, an international team working in Switzerland's CERN facility, the world's biggest particle physics laboratory and home to the Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator. The Alpha team is comparing antimatter to matter to try to understand why the scales tipped toward matter when the universe formed after the big bang.
"This comparison is motivated in part by a question that has baffled science for a long time," said Hayden in a media statement. "The known laws of physics tell us that matter and antimatter should naturally exist in equal amounts. The problem is that we seem to live in a universe that is almost entirely devoid of antimatter."
Hayden suggested there might be a subtle difference between the two that led to the formation of the universe.
"If a difference between hydrogen and anti-hydrogen is discovered, it could prove a valuable clue for solving this mystery," he said.
Matter and antimatter are identical except for an opposite charge, and they annihilate when they meet. Hayden said they are like mirror images or opposites of one another.
"There are other (more complicated) properties like 'spin' that are also opposite," he said.
While scientists have been producing antihydrogen atoms for years, the Alpha team was the first to capture them for a brief amount of time, which is difficult since they can disappear if they touch matter.
"In order to 'hold' these atoms, you are not allowed to 'touch them' using anything made of matter," Hayden said. "So, the way they are held is using a special 'magnetic bottle.'"
The latest development involves hitting the anti-hydrogen atoms with microwaves. As explained in a CERN press release, hydrogen atoms consist of an electron orbiting a nucleus. Scientists can excite the atoms, by firing light at them, causing the electrons to jump to higher orbits. They eventually relax back to their "ground state" by emitting light. The frequency distribution of that light forms a spectrum unique to hydrogen. Basic physics principles dictate that hydrogen and its antimatter counterpart should have an identical spectrum, and it's that spectrum that the Alpha team is hoping to measure. The team published its first modest measurements of the antihydrogen spectrum on Wednesday in Nature, an international science publication.
"This experiment opens the door to precision comparisons of matter and antimatter," said Ashkezari. "Eventually, measurements like this will reveal clues that may help solve one of the deepest mysteries of particle physics."
