Man the two things I would have liked from the article is how much total energy did this cost to do. Im guessing if it was up scaled it should not cost much more than doing a single particle although I guess more magnetic power do to gravity. Then also it does not say why it only lasted that long. Did they intentionally stop or did something stop working and a particle of regular matter managed to touch it.
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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This is just a guess but i reckon they got the data they needed from the experiment so they chose to end it. This is one step in a larger body of work. One of the team members has measured the magnetic moment of the electron extremely precisely and wants to do the same with a positron. I believe this experiment was to show they can capture and manipulate a positron for an extended period of time. Now they can move on to the real measurements!
Im not so sure. creating antimatter is not trivial. if they could keep it contained indefinately at little cost it would be kept to use with other experiments. Maybe that is why its stopped. To be used with another experiment. I just would like to know why and what its final dispensation was.
A positron gets created by radioactive decay. Certainly the process to make an appropriate isotope (Sodium 22) is not trivial but the creation anti-matter will just happen.
Capturing it and storing it is the hard part which the team proved they can do. As they were working with a single positron and have developed the procedure for capturing one there is no reason to keep it for further experiments.
so again. if the energy used to capture is trivial to the energy used to contain. I want to know that. What im really looking for is the practicality of long term storage.
Ah sorry i get you! Yeah like how long could we go? Indefinitely?
Looking at the photo the equipment does seem quite large, it takes up the whole room. Can say for sure they don't have the funding to dedicate that much equipment to a static experiment.
Do agree with you though. Would be interesting to see the numbers for long term storage.
yeah and you might be on to something. they might already have ideas to reduce the size or complexity and might follow up using a different design. I have been involved in a lot of projects with a large and ugly prototype to prove some stuff and then greater effort is put into design once they know the idea works.
Aw yeah for sure they could make it more compact! Would love to see it. If we could actually make meaningful quantities of anti-matter. Could we use it for power? What would transport look like? Anti-matter is one of my favourite subjects lol
Once we unlock antimatter-fueled propulsion we could send a probe to the Proxima Centauri system.
If we try sending one now, even if it escapes the sun's gravity well, it would easily be passed by a future probe if antimatter propulsion is invented within the next century or so.
Once the probe reaches the system, it would take a little over a decade for a radio signal to reach us. So it would need some built-in automation to run research missions because the latency is just too high for remote control from Earth. Unless some sort of quantum entanglement technology enables instantaneous communication, but that might just be scifi...
Probably about 0.03 AI data centers.
that would be way to much. Data centers are huge and energy intensive. If this was using 3% of the power of a datacenter just to keep one antimatter particle isolated. ugh.
For someone knowing jack about this matter^huehue
How big would be the "explosion" if it would touch matter?
Edit: Thanks for all the explaining without ridiculing my absence of knowledge.
a single particle almost nothing. if it was a gram though it would be bad.
A TOS Star Trek novel opens up with a terrorist who detonates a gram of antimatter in a box he's holding (just turns off the power holding it). The city-sized colony was gone.
yeah its some multiples of hiroshima.
Or good. We all love big booms! Especially if they are done for science!
very smol.
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What does near absolute zero mean for a single quantum particle?
Edit:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/491213
My rough understanding is that the particle was kept in a non-eigenstate (e.g. laser perturbed eigen state or some perturbed state), and the temperature is defined as the /beta derived as the thermal weight there real world state vs the eigen states (see link).
Slow particle. Better chance of observing it.
Scientists in 2026: “let’s see how long we can hold onto this extremely angry piece of energy that is absolutely incompatible with our known existence and stability by every metric up until now. It’s probably gonna work, it might not go boom.”