How to Create and Trap Antimatter

Antimatter is usually instantly annihilated when it comes into contact with ordinary matter.

Now researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN have used strong magnetic fields to trap a total of 38 anti-hydrogen atoms for a record 0.166 of a second.

"We've been able to trap about 38 atoms, which is an incredibly small amount, nothing like what we would need to power Star Trek's starship Enterprise or even to heat a cup of coffee," Rob Thompson, head of physics and astronomy at the University of Calgary, said.

However, he added that the small volume of antimatter did not diminish the significance of the achievement.

"It could enable experiments that result in dramatic changes to the current view of fundamental physics or in confirmation of what we already know," he said.

In fiction, an antimatter reactor powers the USS Enterprise in the television and film series Star Trek and in Angels & Demons a secret society hides an antimatter bomb beneath St Peter's Basilica in Rome.

The study, published in the journal Nature, involved cooling negatively charged antiprotons -- reverse versions of hydrogen nuclei -- and compressing them into a similarly cold cloud of positrons, which are the antimatter equivalent of electrons.

The experiment could help to unravel the unsolved question of why the visible universe contains mostly matter.

"Understanding antimatter will hopefully enable us to shed light on why almost everything in the known universe consists of matter," said Mike Charlton, from the University of Swansea and a co-author of the paper.