Monday, November 9, 2015

Strong Forces Between Antipotons

Summary: Woah, a story about antimatter on an antimatter blog! Finally.

Unlike a lot of other anitmatter and particle physics news, this does not come to us from CERN but rather from in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven in New York. Here physicists were able to measure the interactions between antiprotons. It seems like it is also the strong force, an attractive force, that holds the antiprotons together just as it also holds the protons together. This is just one more way in which protons and antiprotons are essentially the same, the exception of their opposite charge. Because of the similarity scientists can rule this out as a possible explanation for the matter/antimatter asymmetry in the universe today.

BBC News
Nature