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physics Antimatter is a reverse-charged form of normal matter seen in some high-energy physics particle collisions. Antimatter famously annihilates itself when brought into contact with normal matter, making observation of atoms of the stuff quite tricky.Astrophysicists cannot explain why the amount of matter created in the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago, predominated over the amount of antimatter created, making study of the stuff intriguing to cosmologists. The goal of trapping antihydrogen atoms is to explore their properties to see how they differ from normal hydrogen ones, with the hope of explaining this mystery.In the Nature Physics.

report from the Alpha Collaboration team at Europe's CERN lab, antihydrogen atoms, essentially hydrogen atoms made of antimatter, lasted 5,000 times longer in a magnetic trap than past attempts, adding up to about 15 minutes of existence. Some of the 309 antihydrogen atoms observed may have lasted as long as 2,000 seconds, the team reports, before annihilation, a 10,000-fold increase."These recent results are significant in showing that some antihydrogen atoms can indeed be trapped long enough to reach the ground atomic state by radiation of photons — just the state needed for precision measurements," says physicist Clifford Surko of the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, in a commentary accompanying the report. "Longer confinement times also translate to more precise measurements of antiatom properties."

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