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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Canadian scientists 'bottle' antimatter Makoto Fujiwara has spent more than a decade in laboratories hunting an elusive prey, the stuff of science fiction - the missing half of everything. He and other Canadian researchers have finally managed to trap their lightning in a bottle. Only it isn't lightning they've got in the bottle - it's antimatter. In a paper appearing online Sunday in the journal Nature Physics, lead author Fujiwara and his colleagues say they've succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for more than 16 minutes - virtually an eternity for a rare substance that scientists have struggled to keep intact for more than a few fractions of a second. "It's a kind of game-changer," said Fujiwara, a researcher at the Vancouver-based TRIUMF, a laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, and an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary. Finally trapping antimatter for a prolonged period of time opens the door for researchers to do the kind of testing they hope could one day solve what's been described as one of the biggest mysteries of science. The dominant theory for the creation of the universe holds that, when the cosmos got started at the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been produced in equal amounts. But antimatter and matter annihilate each other on contact. If the early universe had equal amounts of matter and antimatter, they should have destroyed each other on contact, leaving nothing in the universe but light or other forms of energy. Instead, the antimatter largely vanished, leaving scientists to puzzle over what happened to "the lost half" of the universe, as the researchers described it in a statement. The opportunity to actually learn the properties of antimatter is an accomplishment researchers such as Fujiwara and his team have been painstakingly trying to achieve for years. The team created a cylindrical container or "magnetic bottle" that is about five by 25 centimetres. It uses magnets to keep the anti-hydrogen atoms from touching its walls, suspending the antimatter atoms away from any matter that would cause their destruction. "It has to be suspended in a vacuum . you need a nearly perfect vacuum," Fujiwara said. Read more: www.montrealgazette.com/t.../story.html#ixzz1OU943GOe
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