It’s not often that a scientific experiment gets written up as a front-page news story, as well as a science-fiction twist in a best-selling thriller and a can’t-miss movie script – but that’s what’s been happening to CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator facility, the only place in the world where whole atoms of antimatter are built.
This summer, physicists at the facility are engaged in their own real-life thriller: Two teams of researchers are racing each other to be the first to trap atoms of antihydrogen in a magnetic cage. The researchers who do it first will grab the headlines once again. And the other team? “Being second is last in this game,” said Jeffrey Hangst, a physicist at the University of Aarhus who is the spokesman for the ALPHA antimatter collaboration.
I just hope someone pulls it off.