http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38366963
Back when I was a grad student, they were working hard to build the ability to do this… In fact I had to research it and give a talk on it (Part of the requirements of the grad program was to research a topic outside your field of study and present on it and field questions from the audience)
So far it is behaving as predicted, but it is an important thing to investigate…
We are all here because there is SOMETHING different in the behavior of matter and antimatter – matter and animatter was created in equal quantities in the big-bang, yet here we are in a matter dominated universe.
In a major technological advance, physicists shone a laser on trapped anti-atoms to detect whether they behaved any differently to atoms.
The work could shed light on one of the enduring mysteries about antimatter.
Although the Big Bang produced matter and antimatter in equal amounts, today, the Universe overwhelmingly consists of matter – and current theories cannot explain why.
Antimatter is incredibly difficult to produce and then capture and hold on to – not least because it gets annihilated on contact with ordinary matter.
But by using a specially-designed magnetic trap, researchers working on Cern’s Alpha experiment near Geneva, Switzerland, were able to study properties of anti-hydrogen – the antimatter form of hydrogen.
“The context is to see whether matter and antimatter obey the same laws of physics, which is required by the Standard Model,” Prof Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for Alpha, told the BBC News website.
…
“We’ve tried to shine the same “colour” of light, if you will, on an antihydrogen atom that we would use for hydrogen, to see if it responds in the same way. The answer so far is yes,” said Prof Hangst.
The team found no differences in how antihydrogen behaved compared with ordinary hydrogen, a result that’s perfectly in line with the Standard Model.
“We’d like to take a good look at an antimatter system that is commensurate with a matter system that we know very well. Hydrogen is the most basic atom that we’ve been studying for about 200 years – we know everything about hydrogen. So it’s really compelling to try to compare the two. That’s the overall goal of our programme,” Prof Hangst told me.
The team expects to improve the precision of its measurements in future.
“What really matters here and for the future is how precisely you do that measurement. Right now, we have a precision of a few parts in 10 billion. We hope to get much, much better than that – the precision with hydrogen is a few parts in a thousand trillion,” said the Alpha spokesperson, who is from Aarhus University in Denmark.