ANTIMATTER STAR FULL
"These two electron clouds then race toward each other with full force, interacting with the laser propagating in the opposite direction," HZDR physicist Toma Toncian says in a prepared statement. As the lasers destroy the plastic, they send clouds of electrons toward each other. What's in the middle? This time, there's a tiny piece of plastic that both lasers shoot toward. From their new paper: These positrons are generated when two high-energy electron beams, accelerated by and copropagating with laser pulses that are guided along a plasma channel, collide head-on, emitting synchrotron photons that collide with each other and the respective oncoming laser.
ANTIMATTER STAR HOW TO
So how did the researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf figure out how to generate antimatter? They're using opposing lasers in a setup they're referring to as a laser pincer. The ability to create antimatter in the lab, though, could help scientists more quickly unravel the mysteries of high-energy antimatter (like the positrons that slam toward Earth's upper atmosphere). (Credit: NASA/Goddard/ CI Lab)įor instance, if a researcher wants to study the conditions surrounding pulsars-ultra-dense neutron stars that regularly rotate and emit light like a lighthouse-they'd have to schedule time at a facility with a massive particle accelerator, like the Large Hadron Collider. "This animation takes us into a spinning pulsar, with its strong magnetic field rotating along with it," per NASA. One, it's tremendously difficult to recreate a neutron star's extreme conditions in terms of the science and logistics-imagine if a sugar cube weighed as much as Mount Everest in your laboratory! Two, scientists want to make antimatter for further analysis in the lab. That brings us back to the beginning: Why are scientists so eager to reproduce the conditions of a neutron star? It's for two reasons. "So why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe?" That question is exactly what drives so much research into antimatter. "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter," according to the Geneva, Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (known internationally as CERN), home of the Large Hadron Collider. The antiparticle version of an electron, for instance, is a positron.
It includes various antiparticles that combine with particles and cancel each other out, leaving just energy behind. "Matter is packed so tightly that a sugar-cube-sized amount of material would weigh more than 1 billion tons, about the same as Mount Everest!" This makes neutron stars a perfect laboratory for phenomena of extreme physics, like the creation of antimatter.Ī Subatomic Particle Can Turn Into Its Evil Twinįor its part, antimatter is-as its name suggests-the opposite of matter. "rotons and electrons are literally scrunched together, leaving behind one of nature's most wondrous creations: a neutron star," NASA explains. Due to incredible gravity, the protons and neutrons in a dying star's core are greatly condensed. Let's explore it together.īut why base this work around neutron stars? These collapsing stars, on the brink of death, are one of the most steady sources of antimatter that we know of at the moment. That could make antimatter-based research far more accessible for scientists around the world. This setup, at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) research laboratory in Germany, involves two high-intensity laser beams that can generate a jet of antimatter, as outlined in a paper published earlier this summer in the journal Communications Physics. The positrons are channeled away from the action in powerful jets.Īn international team of physicists have come up with a way to generate antimatter in the lab, allowing them to recreate conditions that are similar to those near a neutron star.The goal is to smash together particles to make electrons and positrons for study.Scientists have mimicked a neutron star in a new hypothetical experiment.
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