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UC Riverside Physicists Discover New Way to Produce Antimatter-containing Atom

Physicists at the University of California, Riverside report that they have discovered a new way to create positronium, an exotic and short-lived atom that could help answer what happened to antimatter in the universe and why nature favoured matter over antimatter at the universe's creation.
Positronium is made up of an electron and its antimatter twin, the positron. It has applications in developing more accurate Positron Emission Tomography or PET scans and in fundamental physics research.
Recently, antimatter made headlines when scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, trapped antihydrogen atoms for more than 15 minutes. Until then, the presence of antiatoms was recorded for only fractions of a second.
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Blobrana


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Two years after reporting the first tantalising hints that matter might be able to bind with antimatter, researchers in California have nailed convincing evidence for the pairing.
David Cassidy and Allen Mills at the University of California at Riverside say that they have found the signature of a molecule in which two positrons antimatter siblings of electrons are bound together by electrons1. This hybrid substance is called molecular positronium, denoted Ps2.
Because electrons and positrons have equal and opposite charges, they can become bound together by their electrical attraction, just as a positively charged proton is orbited by an electron in ordinary hydrogen atoms.

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Blobrana


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Physicists at UC Riverside have created molecular positronium, an entirely new object in the laboratory. Briefly stable, each molecule is made up of a pair of electrons and a pair of their antiparticles, called positrons.
The research paves the way for studying multi-positronium interactions useful for generating coherent gamma radiation and could one day help develop fusion power generation as well as directed energy weapons such as gamma-ray lasers. It also could help explain how the observable universe ended up with so much more matter than antimatter.
Study results appear in tomorrows issue of Nature.

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Fragile particles rarely seen in our Universe have been merged with ordinary electrons to make a new form of matter.
Positronium, as the new molecule is known, was predicted to exist in 1946 but has remained elusive to science.
Now, a US team has created thousands of the molecules by merging electrons with their antimatter equivalent: positrons.
The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, is a key step in the creation of ultrapowerful lasers known as gamma-ray annihilation lasers.

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