Scientists trapped antimatter particle for months but studying it without blowing up lab was a challenge

This will blow your mind.A team of physicists recently trapped a single antimatter particle for months — a delicate feat where one wrong move could’ve blown up their lab, according to new research.Antimatter, which explodes when it comes into contact with the ordinary matter, was captured by researchers at Northwestern University and stored in a cold box where they used incredibly cold temps and magnets to suspend the particle in midair, according to findings published in the Physical Review Letters.“We actually coaxed this very fast positron to sit there and behave for months at a time,” lead researcher Gerald Gabrielse told the tech and science outlet Interesting Engineering. To keep it from touching anything, the team built a contraption called a “one-positron quantum cyclotron,” which uses near zero temperatures and invisible magnetic and electric forces to keep the particle floating in a vacuum, keeping it from ever touching a single wall.The first-of-its-kind experiment put the particle into its lowest possible energy state, letting scientists control it with pinpoint precision for months without destroying it in order to study whether antimatter behaves differently than regular matter it mirrors.The fearless physicists at Northwestern University, under the guidance of Gabrielse, first snagged the particle as it shot out of radioactive material, then froze it to just 0.3 degrees above absolute zero — negative 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.The hardest part, Gabrielse said, was getting the speedy particle to slow down enough to catch it.The breakthrough could help solve one of the universe’s biggest mysteries of why nearly everything is made of regular matter, when the Big Bang should have created equal amounts of both.The antimatter and matter should have wiped each other out billions of years ago under that theory, experts theorized.Scientists have been increasingly doubting the Big Bang theory, and instead have theorized that the universe may ha...