Measuring the Magnetism of Antimatter
In a breakthrough that could one day yield important clues about the nature of matter itself, a team of Harvard scientists have succeeding in measuring the magnetic charge of single particles of matter and antimatter more accurately than ever before.
As described in a March 25 paper in Physical Review Letters, the ATRAP team, led by Gerald Gabrielse, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics, and including post-doctoral fellows Stephan Ettenauer and Eric Tardiff and graduate students Jack DiSciacca, Mason Marshall, Kathryn Marable and Rita Kalra was able to capture individual protons and antiprotons in a “trap” created by electric and magnetic fields. By precisely measuring the oscillations of each particle, the team was able to measure the magnetism of a proton more than 1,000 times more accurately than an antiproton had been measured before. Similar tests with antiprotons produced a 680-fold increase in accuracy in the size of the magnet in an antiproton.
“That is a spectacular jump in precision for any fundamental quality,” Gabrielse said, of the antiproton measurements. “That’s a leap that we don’t often see in physics, at least not in a single step.”
Such measurements, Gabrielse said, could one day help scientists answer a question that seems more suited for the philosophy classroom than the physics lab - why are we here?