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The new Majorana particle showed up inside a superconductor, a material in which the free movement of electrons allows electricity to flow without resistance. The research team, led by Ali Yazdani of Princeton University, placed a long chain of iron atoms, which are magnetic, on top of a superconductor made of lead. Normally, magnetism disrupts superconductors, which depend on a lack of magnetic fields for their electrons to flow unimpeded. But in this case the magnetic chain turned into a special type of superconductor in which electrons next to one another in the chain coordinated their spins to simultaneously satisfy...

ANN ARBOR—Moonless nights outside the Cerro Tololo astronomical observatory in Chile are so dark that when you look down, you can't see your feet. "You can't see your hands," said David Gerdes, physics professor at the University of Michigan. "But you can hold them up to the sky and see a hand-shaped hole with no stars in it. It's really incredible." From this site in the Andes over the next five years, an international team will map one-eighth of the sky in unprecedented detail—aiming to make a time lapse of the past 8 billion years of a slice of the...

Exotic particles called neutrinos have been caught in the act of shape-shifting, switching from one flavor to another, in a discovery that could help solve the mystery of antimatter. Neutrinos come in three flavors — electron, muon and tau — and have been known to change, or oscillate, between certain flavors. Now, for the first time, scientists can definitively say they've discovered muon neutrinos changing into electron neutrinos. The discovery was made at the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan, where scientists sent a beam of muon neutrinos from the J-PARC laboratory in Tokai Village on the eastern coast of Japan,...

(Phys.org) —An international team of physicists working at the University of Michigan has succeeded in building a tabletop antimatter "gun" capable of spewing short bursts of positrons. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team describes how they created the gun, what it's capable of doing, and to what use it may be put. Positrons are anti-particles, the opposite twin of electrons. Besides being created in physics labs, they are also found in jets emitted by black holes and pulsars. To date, the creation of positrons for study has involved very big and expensive machines. One...

... Theorists think that ordinary matter and antimatter, which annihilate when they come into contact with each other, were generated in equal quantities during the Big Bang. But there must be some differences between the two types of matter, they also think, because otherwise matter and antimatter would have canceled each other out completely and there would be no universe. Scientists at CERN are making atoms of antihydrogen to try to pin down what those differences might be. But they're also willing to consider the possibility that the ideas were wrong in the first place, said Joel Fajans, a professor...

In 1938 one of the world's greatest scientists withdrew all his money and disappeared during a boat trip from Palermo to Naples. Whether he killed himself, was murdered or lived on under a different identity is still not known. But no trace of The Italian physicist Ettore Majorana has ever been found. Majorana was a brilliant theorist who in the 1930's showed great insight into physics at a young age. He discovered a hitherto unknown solution to the equations from which quantum scientists deduce elementary particles: the Majorana fermion. Majorana deduced from quantum theory the possibility that there must be...

The world's largest atom smasher, designed as a portal to a new view of physics, has produced its first peek at the unexpected: bits of matter that don't mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts. The discovery, if confirmed, could rewrite the known laws of particle physics and help explain why our universe is made mostly of matter and not antimatter. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the 17-mile (27 km) circular particle accelerator underground near Geneva, Switzerland, have been colliding protons at high speeds to create explosions of energy. From this energy many subatomic particles are produced. Now researchers...

Top boffins at the Large Hadron Collider – mightiest particle-punisher and largest machine of any kind ever assembled by humanity – say that they may have uncovered a vital clue explaining one of the greatest mysteries of physics: namely, how is it that matter itself can exist? This is a mystery because the so-called Standard Model of physics calls for ordinary matter and antimatter to decay in very similar ways. Theory also says that equal amounts of antimatter and regular-type matter (such as that making up the Sun, the Earth, all the life upon it including us etc) should have...

Enlarge Image Antimatter reservoir. A newly discovered belt of antiprotons lies within the innermost portion (pink) of Earth's magnetosphere, the large bubblelike region interior to the blue arc that is controlled by the planet's magnetic field. Credit: Aaron Kaase/NASA/Goddard A newly discovered belt of antimatter circling Earth could be an astronaut's best friend. The belt, which consists of antiprotons trapped by Earth's magnetic field several hundred kilometers above the planet's surface, may ultimately become a key source of fuel for missions venturing beyond the solar system. Researchers analyzing data from the PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter/Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics)...

Satellite confirms the existence of antimatter belts surrounding our planet, opens hopes for fuel use The proton is a familiar figure for those who have taken high school physics. With a +1 charge it is a key constituent to most of the matter of the universe. But nature holds an outlandish vanishing twin -- the antiproton. This exotic antimatter particle carries a -1 charge. Now astrophysicists have discovered a treasure trove of antimatter hidden in the Earth's magnetic field, which could hold the key to grand insights and new space travel possibilities. I. What is Antimatter? The antiproton was first...

Physicists have long suspected that antiprotons must become trapped in a belt around Earth. Now they've found it. The Earth is constantly bombarded by high energy particles called cosmic rays. These are generated by the Sun and by other sources further afield. (The source of the highest energy cosmic rays is still a mystery). The particles are generally protons, electrons and helium nuclei and when they collide with nuclei in the Earth's upper atmosphere they can produce showers of daughter particles. These showers can be so extensive that they can easily be observed from the ground. Astronomers long ago realised...

Physicists claim antimatter breakthrough Physicists in Switzerland say they have captured antimatter for the first time. Scientists have often wondered whether they can get energy from the reaction when antimatter and matter collide. Until now they have found it difficult to make and control antiatoms. Researchers on the ATRAP experiment at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics near Geneva, now think they have succeeded. New Scientist reports they have made and stored thousands of antiatoms indefinitely in a particle trap. The team, led by Gerald Gabrielse of Harvard University, used powerful magnetic and electric fields to slow and ...

Canadian researchers instrumental in game-changing antimatter studyScience fiction is fast approaching science fact as researchers are progressing rapidly toward "bottling" antimatter. In a paper published online today by the journal Nature Physics, the ALPHA experiment at CERN, including key Canadian contributors, reports that it has succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for over 16 minutes. While carrying around bottled antimatter like in the movie Angels and Demons remains fundamentally far-fetched, storing antimatter for long periods of time opens up new vistas for scientists struggling to understand this elusive substance. ALPHA managed to store twice the antihydrogen (the antimatter partner to normal...

So - Dan Brown's turgid blockbuster Angels and Demons, in which a nefarious papal official nicks a vial of antimatter from CERN as part of a complicated scheme to become Pope by menacing the Vatican with explosive destruction. Twaddle? Or actually a perfectly feasible plan ripped from today's headlines, style of thing? Just a few minor technical errors hereWe here on the Reg particle-meddling desk naturally have no interest in the arcane Vatican rules of succession, the putative Illuminati secret society, the likelihood of finding a priest in the Pope's inner circle who would be capable of flying a helicopter...

Enlarge Image Out with a bang. In this artist's rendition, an antihydrogen atom rattles around the ALPHA trap before escaping to create a pair of pions. Credit: CERN/ALPHA collaboration Just 6 months ago, physicists reported that they had trapped atoms made of antimatter for a fraction of a second. Now, the same team has held on to individual atoms of antihydrogen, each of which consists of an antiproton bound to a positron, for up to 15 minutes. That's long enough for an atom to lose all of its internal energy and settle into its least-energetic "ground state," a prerequisite...

Antimatter, an elusive type of matter that's rare in the universe, has now been trapped for more than 16 minutes — an eternity in particle physics. In fact, scientists who've been trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva say isolating the exotic particles has become so routine that they expect to soon begin experiments on this rare substance. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/06/05/antimatter-trapped-for-amazingly-long-16-minutes/#ixzz1OSzvDI4k

Antimatter: The Conundrum of Storage by Paul Gilster on March 11, 2011 Are we ever going to use antimatter to drive a starship? The question is tantalizing because while chemical reactions liberate about one part in a billion of the energy trapped inside matter — and even nuclear reactions spring only about one percent of that energy free — antimatter promises to release what Frank Close calls ‘the full mc2 latent within matter.’ But assuming you can make antimatter in large enough amounts (no mean task), the question of storage looms large. We know how to store antimatter in...

Matter/Antimatter from the Vacuum by Paul Gilster on December 10, 2010 New work at the University of Michigan, now written up in Physical Review Letters, discusses the possibility of producing matter and antimatter from the vacuum. The idea is that a high-energy electron beam combined with an intense laser pulse can pull matter and antimatter components out of the vacuum, creating a cascade of additional particles and anti-particles. UM Engineering research scientist Igor Sokolov has this to say about the theoretical study: “We can now calculate how, from a single electron, several hundred particles can be produced. We believe...

Antimatter atoms have been trapped for the first time, scientists say. Researchers at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have held 38 antihydrogen atoms in place, each for a fraction of a second. Antihydrogen has been produced before but it was instantly destroyed when it encountered normal matter. The team, reporting in Nature, says the ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics. The current "standard model" of physics holds that each particle - protons, electrons, neutrons and a zoo of more exotic particles - has its mirror image antiparticle. The...

A recent search for bright exploding stars -- commonly called supernovas -- found something quite unusual: antimatter.