Sunday, March 14, 2010

'Heavy' Antimatter Created

'Heavy' is a very relative term when talking about the creation of antimatter. The creation of the antihydrogen through the particle collider using gold is an important step. The contact and subsequent annihilation of matter and antimatter is the most energetic explosion per mass. The ability to create and harness antimatter would represent a substantial upgrade to fields from military explosives to space travel, and power generation.

The dangers with its use make handling nuclear materials look safe by comparison. With nuclear materials, it is fairly difficult to get it to explode as an atomic weapon. If the antimatter containment field (magnetic) fails for even a moment, no one would have time to notice.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100304/full/news.2010.108.html

"Physicists have rooted through a morass of collisions to find the heaviest antimatter nucleus yet inside one of their particle accelerators.

Collisions between gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, New York, have yielded heavy isotopes of antihydrogen that include a subatomic particle known as an antistrange quark, which is heavier than less unusual up or down quarks.
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