how did this get past the ethics committee

someone has to draw that particle on a leash, all tied up, gagged, cumming hard

Antimatter matters!

Did they ask for consent?

For someone knowing jack about this matter^huehue

How big would be the "explosion" if it would touch matter?

An electron meeting a positron will apparently release 1.022 MeV of energy. I'm no physicist but my understanding is that this isn't huge (it converts to 1.637×10⁻¹³ Joules). For comparison, fission of a uranium-235 nucleus releases about 200 MeV.

a single particle almost nothing. if it was a gram though it would be bad.

with puppy ears

Poor particle did nothing bad

Man the two things I would have liked from the article is how much total energy did this cost to do. Im guessing if it was up scaled it should not cost much more than doing a single particle although I guess more magnetic power do to gravity. Then also it does not say why it only lasted that long. Did they intentionally stop or did something stop working and a particle of regular matter managed to touch it.

If movies have taught me anything, that particle isn’t tame. It’s just waiting for it’s moment.

This is anti-electron astroturfing right here, verging on hate speech.

very smol.

Or good. We all love big booms! Especially if they are done for science!

Scientists in 2026: “let’s see how long we can hold onto this extremely angry piece of energy that is absolutely incompatible with our known existence and stability by every metric up until now. It’s probably gonna work, it might not go boom.”

ELI5

A zap like a fly in an electrical flytrap or more like a small firecracker?

Not gonna be impressed until they teach it to fetch.

Won't somebody please think of the children antimatter?!

This is actually really exciting! I fucking love anti-matter, always been fascinated by it.

If anti-matter can exist, why is our universe made of matter? This is the Baryon Asymmetry question that this research seeks to answer. The team has proven they can isolate a single positron. The next step is to measure it to as much accuracy as they have with the electron. Perhaps they will find differences!

Summer '25 CERN showed that anti-matter baryons (protons, neutrons, etc) decay differently - link. So there's a good chance they might find something!

Would love to actually see anti-matter but that's a long way off. Really hope anti-matter likes to stick together and we could actually build atoms out of it. Would be crazy to study the properties of anti-water! Maybe that's just science fiction. In any case, very excited for the coming research!

This is just a guess but i reckon they got the data they needed from the experiment so they chose to end it. This is one step in a larger body of work. One of the team members has measured the magnetic moment of the electron extremely precisely and wants to do the same with a positron. I believe this experiment was to show they can capture and manipulate a positron for an extended period of time. Now they can move on to the real measurements!

I always assume it's the same reason why are have mostly right handed people. It's just that the scales tipped at some point and it had to go down one way from that point.

Yeah probably but the important bit is why!

Good point about right handedness! That is actually quite fascinating as well because in most other primates it's a 50/50 split.

Turns out walking is probably the major factor and our brains created the split - link. Still more questions though lol

Im not so sure. creating antimatter is not trivial. if they could keep it contained indefinately at little cost it would be kept to use with other experiments. Maybe that is why its stopped. To be used with another experiment. I just would like to know why and what its final dispensation was.

What does near absolute zero mean for a single quantum particle?

Edit:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/491213

My rough understanding is that the particle was kept in a non-eigenstate (e.g. laser perturbed eigen state or some perturbed state), and the temperature is defined as the /beta derived as the thermal weight there real world state vs the eigen states (see link).

A positron gets created by radioactive decay. Certainly the process to make an appropriate isotope (Sodium 22) is not trivial but the creation anti-matter will just happen.

Capturing it and storing it is the hard part which the team proved they can do. As they were working with a single positron and have developed the procedure for capturing one there is no reason to keep it for further experiments.

so again. if the energy used to capture is trivial to the energy used to contain. I want to know that. What im really looking for is the practicality of long term storage.

I can, but I don't want to do that

Ah sorry i get you! Yeah like how long could we go? Indefinitely?

Looking at the photo the equipment does seem quite large, it takes up the whole room. Can say for sure they don't have the funding to dedicate that much equipment to a static experiment.

Do agree with you though. Would be interesting to see the numbers for long term storage.

yeah and you might be on to something. they might already have ideas to reduce the size or complexity and might follow up using a different design. I have been involved in a lot of projects with a large and ugly prototype to prove some stuff and then greater effort is put into design once they know the idea works.

Slow particle. Better chance of observing it.

Aw yeah for sure they could make it more compact! Would love to see it. If we could actually make meaningful quantities of anti-matter. Could we use it for power? What would transport look like? Anti-matter is one of my favourite subjects lol

No Bad Particles: Physics the Woodhouse Way.

Probably about 0.03 AI data centers.

that would be way to much. Data centers are huge and energy intensive. If this was using 3% of the power of a datacenter just to keep one antimatter particle isolated. ugh.

you wouldn't feel it

"Would love to actually see anti-matter" - are you being literal here? because that would require a vacuum between your eyes and antimatter that emits at a visible frequency. Not entirely impossible, but detection and recording of an anti-hydrogen transition wavelength is more easily achievable. This might be no more than an LCD display indicating a non-zero number though. Exciting for sure, but not necessarily a visual spectacle.

Yeah very literal. Would need millions of atoms of the stuff. Actually maybe that's too dangerous lol

We have managed to see a single strontium atom - link. Maybe that's attainable with anti-matter.

But yeah you're right, capturing an anti-hyrdogen emission would be an huge achievement itself!

$200 says you do (nr)

I gotchu, fam

If you love antimatter. eat banana. It contains traces of antimatter.

Pluribus moment where it's playing dead ಠ_ಠ

It's been done, but not in the visible spectrum: https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/first-spectroscopic-measurement-anti-atom

A TOS Star Trek novel opens up with a terrorist who detonates a gram of antimatter in a box he's holding (just turns off the power holding it). The city-sized colony was gone.

Make the glass of anti water on the moon just in case heh.

Everyone calm down. There's enough love in the world for all the different types of particles.

yeah its some multiples of hiroshima.

Oh, and I suppose you want the electrons and positrons to just hug it out?!

🤣

I wonder what they called it,since they tamed it.

I'm thinking Anton if it's a boy particle, Antonia if it's a girl, and Matty if it's nonbinary.

Perhaps Antti (Niemi) if it's Finnish 🤷🏻

There's a medical test called a PET scan, with PET standing for Positron Emission Tomography. Yes, positron as in antimatter. How it works is the subject is injected with a radioactive substance that decays into antimatter. That antimatter reacts with the normal matter in the subject's body releasing photons. Those photons are then observed by the scanner which builds up a useful picture from them.

Now, I'm not sure how much antimatter is generated in the subject's body, but it's a hell of a lot more than a single positron. And it all annihilates within the subject who doesn't notice a thing. So a single positron is not going to generate much of a bang.