Centauri's Thoughts

I came across an interesting article in New Scientist today, and its something I have pondered for a while, specifically the trapping. A charged particle (electron, proton, positron, or anti-proton) can all be trapped magnetically, but an atom of anti-hydrogen is neutral.

It's a problem ATRAP and ALPHA are still working on. "Capturing antihydrogen atoms is the current frontier, and it's a challenge," says Rolf Landua, a physicist at CERN who advised on the Angels and Demons movie and is rumoured to be the inspiration for Leonardo Vetra, an antimatter scientist in the original story. "So far nobody has managed to do it, but I'm pretty sure we will." Still, encasing a smouldering chunk of antimatter in a portable antihydrogen trap as happens in the book is a quite a way off, he says.

See the entire article here