A single antimatter particle in a cage opens door to ‘revolutionary’ physics

Physicists have now suspended a single positron — the antimatter equivalent of an electron — in mid-air and cooled it to its lowest possible energy state.

The set-up will enable researchers to study magnetic properties of the positron with unprecedented precision. Physicists hope to spot subtle differences between matter and antimatter that could shed light on one of physics’ greatest mysteries.

No one knows why the world is made overwhelmingly of matter. Today’s best theory of particles and forces, the standard model, suggests that just as much antimatter should have been created during the Big Bang.

But when they come into contact, matter and antimatter — which have the same mass but are opposite in properties such as charge — disappear into a burst of energy. If they had been created in equal amounts, “all the matter and antimatter would annihilate and there’d be no Universe left”, says Gerald Gabrielse, a physicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who led the work.

Finding a mismatch in measurements between matter and antimatter “would be revolutionary in physics”, says Gabrielse. The standard model has proved maddeningly accurate at predicting experimental results despite being known to be incomplete. It cannot, for example, explain the apparent existence of dark matter, a substance thought to interact mainly through gravity.

The experiment, detailed in Physical Review Letters on 21 October¹, is a “remarkable achievement” that will provide “a powerful probe for physics beyond the standard model”, says Barbara Maria Latacz, an antimatter physicist at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. “I cannot wait to see their first precision measurements,” says Stefan Ulmer, a physicist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) in Germany.

Spot the difference

Since the 1960s, physicists have studied antimatter in ever-finer detail, hoping to find discrepancies with matter. They have observed a slight preference for matter in the behaviours of a handful of particles, but nowhere near enough to account for the world’s composition.

So far, exquisitely detailed comparisons of protons and antiprotons haven’t uncovered any such differences. Now, Gabrielse’s group hopes to compare a property that can be measured with 10,000 times greater precision in electrons and positrons: their ‘magnetic moments’, which determine how particles wobble on their axis in a magnetic field.

Pin a positron

To do their experiments, the team first faced a significant challenge: capturing a positron. They started with fast-moving positrons emerging from radioactive decay and slowed them down by scattering them off atoms in a crystal of tungsten. Although many were annihilated, the team skimmed off the slowest of the survivors and fed them into a trap.