In publishing its paper, Athena appears to have just beaten a consortium, also based at CERN and known as Atrap, which has also been in the forefront of antimatter research. ''It opens up a whole new line of experiments with antimatter.'' Rolf Landua, a CERN physicist and Athena member.

A paper on their results has been accepted for publication in Nature and was posted on its Web site ''It's very exciting to see the production of antihydrogen,'' said Dr. Hangst, from Aarhus University in Denmark, who coordinated efforts by 39 physicists from 10 institutions in a collaboration named Athena. They then observed the flashes of energy when the new antihydrogen atoms annihilated themselves in collisions with ordinary matter in the walls of the chamber.Īt least 50,000 antihydrogen atoms have been created since the experiment began in August, said Dr. Whereas hydrogen consists of a positively charged proton circled by a negatively charged electron, in antihydrogen the proton's counterpart, a positively charged antiproton, is circled by an antielectron, otherwise known as a positron. The new research was conducted by physicists at CERN, the particle physics laboratory outside Geneva.īy corralling clouds of antimatter particles in a cylindrical chamber laced with detectors and electric and magnetic fields, the physicists assembled antihydrogen atoms, the looking glass equivalent of hydrogen, the most simple atom in nature.

Antimatter light spectrum