Just when our curiosity leads us to try to understand and above all to understand all those scientific papers that call our attention, we begin to read about quite revolutionary concepts such as antiparticles, antimatter ... which, despite the fact that their name may be more or less familiar, the truth is that we do not know its meaning completely.
Today is the time to get to know all these terms a little better. Surely if someone suggested you draw what antimatter is like, giving color, your bet would be to draw some kind of black dot, something logical on the other hand, even more so if we take into account our initial ignorance about this type of field. Now and thanks to CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, we know quite precisely the color of this material.
What's that about antimatter, antihydrogen, and other terms?
To understand the concept of antimatter a little better, I would like to give you a very simple example that I hope is easy to understand. Basically in nature there are different elements such as a hydrogen particle or an electron. All these elements of nature, in turn, have a kind of twin, an antiparticle with opposite electric charge. In the specific case of the electron, its antiparticle would be the antielectron or positron while, in the case of hydrogen, its antiparticle would be antihydrogen.
If we go a step further, we find that when several antiparticles come together they form what is called antimatter. At this point I would like to tell you that, despite the term, the truth is that we are not talking about anything other than matter, with the exception that antimatter has the opposite charge to what we know. What is true is that, If a particle of matter and one of antimatter meet, in general and according to physics, they destroy each other and become high-energy photons.
The ALPHA group at CERN has been commissioned to reveal the color of antimatter
Going into a little more detail, as it has been revealed through an official document, has been the CERN ALPHA team, which is currently working on a project in which they are dedicated to creating antimatter, specifically antihydrogen antiparticles to find the limits of physics, which have managed to reveal with great precision the color of antimatter.
Specifically and in their latest experiment they have achieved measure the color of antimatter with an accuracy of 12 decimal places. As those responsible for the team have revealed, the truth is that the experiment has been classified as successful although scientists, apparently, say they are a bit disappointed because they have not found what they were really looking for.
How have they managed to measure the color of antimatter at CERN?
To carry out this experiment, as officially reported, the CERN ALPHA team has created antihydrogen by mixing positrons and antiprotons obtained with the Antiproton Decelerator they have in the center. Once this step is done, the team has achieved trap antihydrogen in a magnetic trap, once stabilized, a laser beam to measure its color spectrum with a precision hitherto never achieved.
Apparently and as published by the team in charge of carrying out this experiment, the result of the experiment was disappointing because the color spectrum obtained is the same as that of hydrogen. At this point, it should be noted that scientists had hopes of finding some small variation that would allow them to focus on new avenues of research with the aim of discovering why there are many more matter particles in the universe today than antimatter.