Landmark If you dropped antimatter, would it fall down or up? In a unique laboratory experiment, researchers have now observed the downward path taken by individual atoms of antihydrogen, providing a definitive answer: antimatter falls down.
In confirming antimatter and regular matter are gravitationally attracted, the finding also rules out gravitational repulsion as the reason why antimatter is largely missing from the observable universe.
Researchers from the international Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration at CERN in Switzerland published their findings today in the journal Nature, an effort supported by more than a dozen countries and private institutions, including the U.S. through the joint U.S. National Science Foundation/Department of Energy Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering program.
“The success of the ALPHA collaboration is a testament to the importance of teamwork across continents and scientific communities,” says Vyacheslav “Slava” Lukin, a program director in NSF’s Physics Division. “Understanding the nature of antimatter can help us not only understand how our universe came to be but can enable new innovations never before thought possible — like positron emission tomography (PET) scans that have saved many lives by applying our knowledge of antimatter to detect cancerous tumors in the body.”
The Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration is an international group working with antihydrogen atoms at CERN, to understand the fundamental symmetries between matter and antimatter. Researchers announced breakthrough results from an experiment looking to understand gravity’s effect on antimatter. Credit: U.S. National Science Foundation
Matter’s Elusive, Volatile Twin
Beyond the imagined antimatter-fueled warp drives and
Our bodies, the Earth, and most everything else scientists know about in the universe are overwhelmingly made of regular matter consisting of protons, neutrons, and electrons, like atoms of oxygen, carbon, iron, and the other elements of the periodic table.
Antimatter, on the other hand, is regular matter’s twin, though with some opposite properties. For example, antiprotons have a negative charge while protons have a positive charge. Antielectrons (also known as positrons) are positive while electrons are negative.
Kevin M. Jones, a program manager in the Division of Physics at the U.S. National Science Foundation and the William Edward McElfresh Professor of Physics Emeritus at Williams College, provides a brief description of what antimatter is and the overall value of studying it. Credit: U.S.National Science Foundation
However, perhaps most challenging for experimenters, “As soon as antimatter touches matter, it blows up,” said ALPHA collaboration member and University of California, Berkeley plasma physicist Joel Fajans.
The combined mass of matter and antimatter is transformed entirely into energy in a reaction so powerful that scientists call it an annihilation.
“For a given mass, such annihilations are the densest form of energy release that we know of,” Fajans added.
But, the amount of antimatter used in the ALPHA experiment is so small that the energy created by antimatter/matter annihilations is perceptible only to sensitive detectors.
“Still, we have to manipulate the antimatter very carefully or we will lose it,” said Fajans.
An artist’s conceptual rendering of antihydrogen atoms contained within the magnetic trap of the ALPHA-g apparatus. As the field strength at the top and bottom of the magnetic trap is reduced, the antihydrogen atoms escape, touch the chamber walls, and annihilate. Most of the annihilations occur beneath the chamber, showing that gravity is pulling the antihydrogen down. The rotating magnetic field lines in the animation represent the invisible influence of the magnetic field on the antihydrogen. The magnetic field does not rotate in the actual experiment. Credit: Keyi “Onyx” Li/U.S. National Science Foundation
Dropping an Antimatter Banger
“Broadly speaking, we’re making antimatter and we’re doing a Leaning Tower of Pisa kind of experiment,” said Wurtele, referring to their experiment’s simpler intellectual ancestor, Galileo’s perhaps apocryphal 16th-century experiment demonstrating identical gravitational acceleration of two simultaneously dropped objects of similar volume but different mass. “We’re letting the antimatter go, and we’re seeing if it goes up or down.”
For the ALPHA experiment, the antihydrogen was contained within a tall cylindrical vacuum chamber with a variable magnetic trap, called ALPHA-g. The scientists reduced the strength of the trap’s top and bottom magnetic fields until the antihydrogen atoms could escape and the relatively weak influence of gravity became apparent.
As each antihydrogen
Thus, gravity was causing the antihydrogen to fall down.
The Matter/Antimatter Mystery
Despite some modest sources of antimatter — like positrons emitted from the decay of potassium, even within a banana — scientists do not see much of it in the universe. However, the laws of physics predict antimatter should exist in roughly equal amounts as regular matter. Scientists call that conundrum the baryogenesis problem.
One potential explanation is that antimatter was gravitationally repelled by regular matter during the
The ALPHA collaboration researchers will continue to probe the nature of antihydrogen. In addition to refining their measurement of the effect of gravity, they are also studying how antihydrogen interacts with electromagnetic radiation through spectroscopy.
“If antihydrogen were somehow different from hydrogen, that would be a revolutionary thing because the physical laws, both in quantum mechanics and gravity, say the behavior should be the same,” said Wurtele. “However, one doesn’t know until one does the experiment.”
For more on this discovery:
Reference: “Observation of the effect of gravity on the motion of antimatter” by E. K. Anderson, C. J. Baker, W. Bertsche, N. M. Bhatt, G. Bonomi, A. Capra, I. Carli, C. L. Cesar, M. Charlton, A. Christensen, R. Collister, A. Cridland Mathad, D. Duque Quiceno, S. Eriksson, A. Evans, N. Evetts, S. Fabbri, J. Fajans, A. Ferwerda, T. Friesen, M. C. Fujiwara, D. R. Gill, L. M. Golino, M. B. Gomes Gonçalves, P. Grandemange, P. Granum, J. S. Hangst, M. E. Hayden, D. Hodgkinson, E. D. Hunter, C. A. Isaac, A. J. U. Jimenez, M. A. Johnson, J. M. Jones, S. A. Jones, S. Jonsell, A. Khramov, N. Madsen, L. Martin, N. Massacret, D. Maxwell, J. T. K. McKenna, S. Menary, T. Momose, M. Mostamand, P. S. Mullan, J. Nauta, K. Olchanski, A. N. Oliveira, J. Peszka, A. Powell, C. Ø. Rasmussen, F. Robicheaux, R. L. Sacramento, M. Sameed, E. Sarid, J. Schoonwater, D. M. Silveira, J. Singh, G. Smith, C. So, S. Stracka, G. Stutter, T. D. Tharp, K. A. Thompson, R. I. Thompson, E. Thorpe-Woods, C. Torkzaban, M. Urioni, P. Woosaree and J. S. Wurtele, 27 September 2023, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06527-1