By feeding antiprotons and negatively charged hydrogen ions into the trap, one at a time, they were able to measure, under identical conditions, the cyclotron frequencies of the two particle types, comparing their charge-to-mass ratios. In this device, a particle follows a cyclical trajectory with a frequency, close to the cyclotron frequency, that scales with the trap's magnetic-field strength and the particle's charge-to-mass ratio. To make the measurements, the team confined antiprotons and negatively charged hydrogen ions, which they used as a proxy for protons, in a Penning trap. This work involved 18 months of work at CERN's antimatter factory. The finding, published in Nature, actually came from a different experiment, which was examining the charge-to-mass ratios of protons and antiprotons, one of the other important measurements that could determine the key difference between the two. Now, the BASE collaboration has shown, within strict boundaries, that antimatter does in fact respond to gravity in the same way as matter. Naturally, scientists around the world are trying hard to find something different between the two, which could explain why we exist.Īs part of this quest, scientists have explored whether matter and antimatter interact similarly with gravity, or whether antimatter would experience gravity in a different way than matter, which would violate Einstein's weak equivalence principle. However, one of the great mysteries of physics today, known as "baryon asymmetry," is that, despite the fact that they seem equivalent, the universe seems made up entirely of matter, with very little antimatter. They are essentially equivalent, except that where a particle has a positive charge its antiparticle has a negative one. Matter and antimatter create some of the most interesting problems in physics today.
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