“Researchers at CERN have developed a new technique that can produce over 15 thousand antihydrogen atoms in just a few hours, a major improvement over earlier methods, which typically generated a few thousand atoms over an entire day. The new method could make antimatter experiments much faster and allow researchers to collect higher-quality data,” reports The Doomslayer.
CERN explains:
In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers at the ALPHA experiment at CERN’s Antimatter Factory report a new technique that allows them to produce over 15 000 antihydrogen atoms – the simplest form of atomic antimatter – in a matter of hours.
“These numbers would have been considered science fiction 10 years ago,” said Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment. “With larger numbers of antihydrogen atoms now more readily available, we can investigate atomic antimatter in greater detail and at a faster pace than before.”
To create atomic antihydrogen (a positron orbiting an antiproton), the ALPHA collaboration must produce and trap clouds of antiprotons and positrons separately, then cool them down and merge them so that antihydrogen atoms can form. This process has been refined and steadily improved over many years. But now, using a pioneering technique to cool the positrons, the ALPHA team has increased the rate of production of antihydrogen atoms eightfold….First, the positrons are collected from a radioactive form of sodium and contained in what is known as a Penning trap, where fine-tuned electromagnetic fields hold the antiparticles in place…a cloud of laser-cooled beryllium ions [is then added] to the trap…
This got the positron cloud down to a temperature of around -266 °C, making it much more likely to form antihydrogen atoms when mixed with the antiprotons….Using this approach for cooling positrons, the ALPHA experiment produced over 2 million antihydrogen atoms over the course of the experimental runs of 2023–24….Researchers are making use of the unprecedented numbers of antihydrogen atoms to study the effect of gravity on antimatter …This technique will make it possible to probe deeper into the properties and behavior of atomic antimatter.
Scientists have developed a tiny robot that can deliver drugs to remote places in the body (by traveling through blood vessels) and then dissolve.
Nanorobots are also being used to fight cancer. “In a major advancement in nanomedicine, Arizona State University scientists…have successfully programmed nanorobots to shrink tumors by cutting off their blood supply.” Scientists have also developed tiny robots made of human cells to repair damaged cells.
