Physicists find ways to increase antihydrogen production

(Phys.org)—There are many experiments that physicists would like to perform on antimatter, from studying its properties with spectroscopic measurements to testing how it interacts with gravity. But in order to perform these ...

Hauling antiprotons around in a van

A team of researchers working on the antiProton Unstable Matter Annihilation (PUMA) project near CERN's particle laboratory, according to a report in Nature, plans to capture a billion antiprotons, put them in a shipping ...

Physicists measure force that makes antimatter stick together

Peering at the debris from particle collisions that recreate the conditions of the very early universe, scientists have for the first time measured the force of interaction between pairs of antiprotons. Like the force that ...

New antimatter method to provide 'a major experimental advantage'

(Phys.org)—Researchers have proposed a method for cooling trapped antihydrogen which they believe could provide 'a major experimental advantage' and help to map the mysterious properties of antimatter that have to date ...

Tevatron atom smasher to close in September

(PhysOrg.com) -- The 25-year-old Tevatron particle accelerator in the US will end its operations in September this year since no funds are available to extend its life for three more years.

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Antiproton

The antiproton (p, pronounced p-bar), which is also sometimes referred to as a negatron, is the antiparticle of the proton. Antiprotons are stable, but they are typically short-lived since any collision with a proton will cause both particles to be annihilated in a burst of energy.

The existence of the antiproton with −1 electric charge, opposite to the +1 electric charge of the proton, was predicted by Paul Dirac in his 1933 Nobel Prize lecture [1]. Dirac received the Nobel Prize for his previous 1928 publication of his Dirac Equation that predicted the existence of positive and negatve solutions to the Energy Equation (E = mc2) of Einstein and the existence of the positron, the antimatter analog to the electron, with positive charge and opposite spin.

The antiproton was experimentally confirmed in 1955 by University of California, Berkeley physicists Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain, for which they were awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics. An antiproton consists of two up antiquark and one down antiquark (uud). The properties of the antiproton that have been measured all match the corresponding properties of the proton, with the exception that the antiproton has opposite electric charge and magnetic moment than the proton. The question of how matter is different from antimatter remains an open problem, in order to explain how our universe survived the Big Bang and why so little remains of antimatter today in our solar system.[citation needed]

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