Antimatter atoms cooled with lasers

摘要

FOR the first time, one of our most precise mechanisms for controlling matter has been applied to antimatter atoms, slowing them down for measurement. Antimatter particles have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter, but the opposite charge. An antihydrogen atom, for example, is made of an antiproton and a positron, the antimatter equivalent of an electron. Makoto Fujiwara at TRIUMF, Canada's national particle accelerator centre, and his colleagues used the ALPHA-2 experiment at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, to create clouds of about 1000 antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap.