by monster » Thu Oct 19, 2006 12:01 am
<!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10302&feedId=online-news_rss20">Link</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Mixing antimatter and matter usually has predictably violent consequences – the two annihilate one another in a fierce burst of energy.<br><br>But physicists in Geneva have found a new way to make the two combine, at least briefly, into a single substance. This exceptionally unstable stuff, made of protons and antiprotons, is called protonium.<br><br>[snip]<br><br>In a feat of "antichemistry", some of this man-made antimatter chemically combined with normal matter in an experiment at the CERN particle physics lab back in 2002 – but nobody realised it at the time.<br><br>[snip]<br><br>Researchers led by Evandro Rizzini at Italy's University of Brescia believe that some of the antiprotons reacted with ionised molecules of ordinary hydrogen, stealing away a proton. These proton-antiproton systems lasted microseconds at most, but that was long enough for many of them to drift away from the core of the experiment before exploding.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i></i>