Klix.ba at CERN: We Went Inside the Antimatter Factory

The headquarters of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva is home to a large number of fascinating laboratories, experiments, particle accelerators and other similar facilities whose role is to advance our knowledge of the universe. One of these sites is the Antimatter Factory, to which a Klix.ba reporter was given exclusive access.

The perhaps somewhat cinematic name of a large building in the veritable small town that is CERN is certainly intentional, but by no means exaggerated. At the Antimatter Factory, antimatter really is created, and then stored and studied. For want of better words, antimatter is matter made up of antiparticles, partners of "ordinary" particles that have opposite key properties.

If there were an object made of antimatter, say an "anticomputer", at first glance it would not differ at all from an ordinary, material computer. However, if the two objects were to "meet", they would annihilate each other.

It is no wonder, then, that antimatter is an extremely rare phenomenon. So rare that CERN is probably the place with the largest amount of antimatter in the entire known universe. And this, too, is no exaggeration.

Anja Kranjc Horvat, a doctoral student at CERN from Slovenia, explained some interesting details about the Factory to us: what is actually done there and why it exists at all.

"The Antimatter Factory holds one record, which is that CERN has the largest amount, or rather density, of antimatter in the entire universe, at least as far as we know. When we talk about antimatter, we are talking about antiatoms, not antiparticles, and that is the key difference," said Kranjc Horvat, adding that, for now, the Factory produces only antihydrogen.

A big question is why there is so little antimatter, especially given that at the time of the Big Bang the ratio of matter to antimatter was 50-50.

"Almost all the antimatter and matter annihilated at that point, but a certain amount of matter remained, which we see around us today," said the young scientist. The question is why!

This is exactly what scientists are trying to answer at the Antimatter Factory, as well as at the LHC, namely in the ATLAS and CMS detectors and in the LHCb experiment.

Although we have managed to create it, experts still do not know everything about antimatter, especially how it behaves under the influence of gravity – whether, when "released", it would fall or rise into the sky.

Most believe that antimatter would behave like ordinary matter and fall to the ground, although there are hypotheses suggesting it should go upwards. The answer to this question, too, will hopefully be found at CERN in the foreseeable future.

And how does the Factory make antimatter? Put simply, by slowing down antiparticles, namely antiprotons. While CERN is famous for its accelerators such as the LHC – rings that speed up particles – the Antimatter Factory is its antithesis and does its job using decelerators. In them, the antiprotons are "calmed down" and, on leaving for other important parts of the facility, are assembled into antihydrogen atoms.

"Pieces" of antimatter have also been successfully kept alive, or stored, but for relatively short periods of time. Of course, there are exceptions here too, and the current records range from 1,000 seconds to more than a year.

Anja also recalled a film, "Angels and Demons", in which antimatter plays an important role. However entertaining it may be, the film, Anja says, is disastrous, because it gets very little right. One of the mistakes is the fooled eye scanner at the entrance to an important part of the Factory. The "villain" removes a scientist's eye and, simply by holding the organ in front of the scanner, successfully gets in and steals the antimatter.

The truth is somewhat different, as the scanner at the Antimatter Factory is smart enough to distinguish a "living" eye from the eye of a dead person, because it reads the blood vessels, which in the event of death will not be filled with blood.

As a reminder, a group of 20 teachers from Bosnia and Herzegovina has travelled to the headquarters of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, where they are taking part in the First Bosnian-Herzegovinian CERN Teacher Programme.

The aim of the visit is to introduce teachers from BiH to current research in particle physics, and they will then pass on their experience to their students – the future physicists and engineers.

This cooperation was supported, in addition to CERN itself, by ANNT, the Association for the Advancement of Science and Technology.

Source: klix.ba