For the first time, Northwestern University physicists have coaxed a single positron — the antimatter counterpart of an electron — into an exquisitely controlled quantum state.
  • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    291·
    7 days ago

    I wonder what they called it,since they tamed it.

    I’m thinking Anton if it’s a boy particle, Antonia if it’s a girl, and Matty if it’s nonbinary.

    Perhaps Antti (Niemi) if it’s Finnish 🤷🏻

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    6 days ago

    How did they know at any given point that it was still there? Wouldn’t they have to interact with it to be sure, causing an explosion and annihilating it? The explosion would be incredibly small with just one particle. Is the lack of explosion their only evidence that they had contained it? I’m stumped as to what it actually means to have one particle like this. How can you even know what temperature it is without interacting with it? And how do you interact with it without destroying it?

      • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        Yeah I’m sure the annihilation would be detectable. I’m asking if there’s any way short of that to detect the antimatter particle.

  • motionofethre@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    What does near absolute zero mean for a single quantum particle?

    Edit:

    https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/491213

    My rough understanding is that the particle was kept in a non-eigenstate (e.g. laser perturbed eigen state or some perturbed state), and the temperature is defined as the /beta derived as the thermal weight there real world state vs the eigen states (see link).

  • mildseason@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    103·
    7 days ago

    This is actually really exciting! I fucking love anti-matter, always been fascinated by it.

    If anti-matter can exist, why is our universe made of matter? This is the Baryon Asymmetry question that this research seeks to answer. The team has proven they can isolate a single positron. The next step is to measure it to as much accuracy as they have with the electron. Perhaps they will find differences!

    Summer '25 CERN showed that anti-matter baryons (protons, neutrons, etc) decay differently - link. So there’s a good chance they might find something!

    Would love to actually see anti-matter but that’s a long way off. Really hope anti-matter likes to stick together and we could actually build atoms out of it. Would be crazy to study the properties of anti-water! Maybe that’s just science fiction. In any case, very excited for the coming research!

      • 42yeah@eviltoast.orgEnglish
        11·
        7 days ago

        Don’t they annihilate each other when they encounter matter? How can a banana contain antimatter safely?

        • Tehdastehdas@piefed.socialEnglish
          7·
          6 days ago

          They do, and it can’t. It’s getting annihilated the first time it touches normal matter, producing other radiation. Nuclear decay in the banana produces more antimatter.

      • alpine_jim@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        Bananas always get the hype for being particularly rich in potassium-40, which is the unstable isotope, but Brazil nuts have far more, and potato and carrot are about as radioactive as banana.

      • Patrikvo@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3·
        6 days ago

        That’s a good idea for Star Trek. They allready had the mushroom powered warpdrive. So a starship powered by bananas isn’t that far fetched.

    • betanumerus@lemmy.caEnglish
      13·
      7 days ago

      “Would love to actually see anti-matter” - are you being literal here? because that would require a vacuum between your eyes and antimatter that emits at a visible frequency. Not entirely impossible, but detection and recording of an anti-hydrogen transition wavelength is more easily achievable. This might be no more than an LCD display indicating a non-zero number though. Exciting for sure, but not necessarily a visual spectacle.

    • nomad@infosec.pubEnglish
      15·
      7 days ago

      I always assume it’s the same reason why are have mostly right handed people. It’s just that the scales tipped at some point and it had to go down one way from that point.

      • Uli@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        6·
        7 days ago

        I think the universe actually is perfectly balanced between antimatter and matter, but variation across space emerged as space expanded and our entire observable universe happens to be in a pocket where there was more matter than antimatter.

        • nomad@infosec.pubEnglish
          2·
          7 days ago

          Sounds reasonable. Assuming matter and antimatter split into equal parts that would have to be the case. I’m not sure if annihilation is a perfect process. Assuming energy density creates separation of energy into matter and antimatter of equal parts and no sudden annihilation happens, that would most certainly result in such a conclusion.

      • mildseason@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        24·
        7 days ago

        Yeah probably but the important bit is why!

        Good point about right handedness! That is actually quite fascinating as well because in most other primates it’s a 50/50 split.

        Turns out walking is probably the major factor and our brains created the split - link. Still more questions though lol

        • a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.worldEnglish
          22·
          7 days ago

          I actually think I solved that one a long time ago. I want with right, it works. Left–feels weird. Not like a good sort of “someone else is doing it” feeling like if you sit on your hand until it goes numb sort of thing.

          But I digress. I think that mostly the survivors won the war regarding how to pleasure themselves and therefore have more of a reason to survive.