5 ms·
Antimatter is generated at extremely high (relativistic) speeds and generally has to be slowed down ("cooled") in order to make careful measurements or to even
by jessriedel 8y ago
Antimatter is generated at extremely high (relativistic) speeds and generally has to be slowed down ("cooled") in order to make careful measurements or to even collect multiple particles together. And that can't be done unless you can steer the particle with electromagnetism.
If you just generated individual relativistic anti-neutrons and tried to watch them follow ballistic trajectories in gravity, I suspect they'd just look like perfectly straight lines up to the limits of your detector resolution. Not sure though.
(The only other quasi-stable neutral particles are neutrinos, and those are essentially non-interacting with any detector. They leave relativistically and you'll never see them again.)
- saagarjha 8y agoGood point; I forgot about the process of actually creating the antimatter.
- rpwverheij 8y agowhat I get from the article is that all 3 experiments are doing something new with antimatter in some way. So I imagine the extend to which we can actually make, handle and measure antimatter to be a very determining factor in what sort of experiments can be done
- phyzome 8y agoNeutrons can be contained in a magnetic bottle, even if they don't last long in isolation. Presumably the same is true for antineutrons, although I don't know how hard it would be to slow them with magnetic fields...
- jessriedel 8y agoYea, thanks for mentioning. I believe those bottles only work when the neutrons are already at very slow speeds. They exploit the strong force and the residual electromagnetic "handle" neutrons have by virtue of being built from charged components (quarks), which leave them with a magnetic dipole moment.