And we'll learn the answer in just a few years through the simplest of all experiments: putting an anti-atom in a gravitational field, and watching which way it falls.These drawings were filed as part of the patent and show a craft which looks a lot like a UFO (Photo: Salvatore Cezar Pais/ Google) We could change the currently-known limits of what humans can create in the Universe. But if that's the case, a whole new world of possibilities will be unlocked. The equivalence principle may not be true for antimatter it may, in fact, be 100% anti-true. Until we measure the gravitational acceleration of antimatter to the precision necessary to determine whether it falls up or down, we must keep ourselves open to the possibility that nature might not behave as we expect. But no matter how wild or tame your theories are, you must absolutely confront them with experimental data only through measuring the Universe and putting it to the test can you ever accurately determine how the laws of nature work. It's an incredible possibility, one that's considered wildly unlikely by practically all theoretical physicists. requires negative gravitational mass, which could be exactly what antimatter might provide. The Alcubierre solution to General Relativity, enabling motion similar to warp drive. The gravitational force is always attractive, and there's simply no way around that. The reason? Because unlike the electric force, which is generated by positive and negative charges, there's only one type of gravitational "charge," and that's mass-and-energy. There's no way to set up a uniform gravitational field in a region of space, either, like you can between the parallel plates of an electrical capacitor. If you have an electric charge outside an electrical conductor, the inside of the conductor will be shielded from that electric source.īut there's no way to shield yourself from the gravitational force.
On an electrical conductor, free charges live on the surface and can move around, redistributing themselves in response to whatever other charges are around. Rolf Landua / CERNĬurrently, t here is no such thing as a gravitational conductor. Antimatter may be that mass, but we don't yet know, experimentally. The possibility of having artificial gravity is tantalizing, but it is predicated on the existence. In every way that matters, we've determined that antimatter's properties are exactly as standard physics predicts them to be. We've struck them with photons, discovering that they have the same emission and absorption spectra as atoms.
We've successfully held them stable for around 20 minutes at a time, far exceeding the microsecond timescales that unstable, fundamental particles survive. By using a combination of electric and magnetic fields, we can confine these anti-atoms and keep them stable, away from the matter that would cause them to annihilate.
Anti-protons and positrons (anti-electrons) can be created, slowed down, and forced to interact with each other, where they form neutral anti-hydrogen. One of the great strides that's been taken recently is the creation of not just particles of antimatter, but neutral, stable bound states of it. With the upcoming ALPHA-g detector, we might finally know the answer. The ALPHA collaboration has come the closest of any experiment to measuring the behavior of neutral.