Physicists trap antimatter atoms

GENEVA – Scientists may have been able to capture elusive atoms of antimatter, but don’t expect that to lead to interstellar rocket engines or powerful bombs.

International physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said they had overcome a basic problem in studying atoms of antimatter. While such atoms have been created routinely in the lab for years, they tend to disappear so fast that scientists don’t have a chance to study them.

But in a report published online by the journal Nature, the scientists said they’d been able to trap individual atoms and keep them around for a bit more than one-tenth of a second. To a particle physicist, that’s a long time.

“For us it’s a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter,” the team’s spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, said Thursday

Hangst and his colleagues, who included scientists from Britain, Brazil, Canada, Israel and the United States, trapped 38 anti-hydrogen atoms individually. Hangst said that since the experiments they reported in Nature, they’ve been able to hold on to the atoms even longer.

Hangst played down speculation that antimatter might someday be harnessed as a source of energy or to create a powerful weapon like in Dan Brown’s book, “Angels and Demons.”

“It would take longer than the age of the universe to make one gram of antimatter,” he said.