21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Laser helps unlock antimatter secrets.

“Because we have this mystery about the disappearance of antimatter from the creation of the Universe, we always try to look at antimatter very carefully,” added Prof Hangst.

Writing in Nature journal, the Alpha team reports the first ever measurement of how antihydrogen responds to laser light at a precisely tuned frequency.

“We’ve tried to shine the same “colour” of light, if you will, on an antihydrogen atom that we would use for hydrogen, to see if it responds in the same way. The answer so far is yes,” said Prof Hangst.
The team found no differences in how antihydrogen behaved compared with ordinary hydrogen, a result that’s perfectly in line with the Standard Model.

“We’d like to take a good look at an antimatter system that is commensurate with a matter system that we know very well. Hydrogen is the most basic atom that we’ve been studying for about 200 years – we know everything about hydrogen. So it’s really compelling to try to compare the two. That’s the overall goal of our programme,” Prof Hangst told me.
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Even a slight difference in properties between hydrogen and antihydrogen would break basic principles of physics – and possibly shed light on the matter-antimatter imbalance in the Universe.