Antimatter Production Breakthrough

Researchers at the ALPHA experiment at CERN have published a new paper that reports a new cooling technique that allows them to produce antihydrogen eight times faster than before.

Dr. Mike Hayden, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at SFU Physics and a collaborator at the ALPHA experiment, tells us that fifteen years ago it tooks weeks of effort to produce, trap, and detect just a dozen antihydrogen atoms.  In 2010, their total for the entire year was 38 atoms.  A new game-changing technique now enables the team to produce and trap 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in a single overnight shift.

This new approach involves introducing laser-cooled beryllium atoms to sympathetically cool positrons that are used to synthesize antihydrogen.  The positron cloud would cool down to -266 °C, making it far more likely to form antihydrogen atoms with antiprotons compared to previous cooling techniques.  This allowed the researchers to accumulate over 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in under seven hours, and then immediately use them for experiments the following day.

Read the news release from CERN and the full paper on Nature Communications.