Scientists Just Mixed Matter and Antimatter (It Didn't Explode)

Win a meteorite: join my mailing list briankeatimg.com/yt Does antimatter behave differently than ordinary matter? Recently, an experiment conducted on hybrid matter-antimatter atoms has defied researchers’ expectations.So far physicists have found nothing amiss, no sign that antimatter particles—which are just the oppositely charged counterparts of familiar particles—obey different rules. In 2013, Dr. Anna Sótér was working at the CERN laboratory on a new antimatter experiment. Her group assembled hybrid matter-antimatter atoms by firing antiprotons into liquid helium. How cool is that...literally! Antiprotons are the negatively charged counterparts of protons, so an antiproton could occasionally take an electron’s place orbiting a helium nucleus. The result was a small band of “antiprotonic helium” atoms that could be used to test deviations in the behavior of matter vs. antimatter via differences in their spectra. Whereas the spectral lines of normal atoms would have behaved completely unpredictably in the dense fluid, broadening by one million times, the antimatter hybrid atoms did the opposite. Below about 2.2 kelvin, where helium becomes a “superfluid,” they saw a line almost as distinct as the best they'd seen in ordinary helium gas. Despite presumably being battered by the surroundings, the Frankenstein matter-antimatter atoms were behaving in unison. Read the Nature paper about High precision experiments on antiprotonic helium https://shorturl.at/5rUIU 🎥 Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get Dr. Keating’s book and learn more about the discoveries that shape our universe, My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu 🔗 Full details on the Simons Observatory: simonsobservatory.org The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating #helium #antimatter #particlephysics