For those still holding out hope that antimatter levitates rather than falls in a gravitational field, like normal matter, the results of a new experiment are a dose of cold reality.
. All normal matter, such as protons, neutrons and electrons, have anti-particles that bear the opposite electrical charge and, when they encounter their normal matter counterpart, annihilate completely.
Nevertheless, the idea that antimatter and matter might be affected differently by gravity was enticing because it could potentially explain some cosmic conundrums. For example, it could have led to the spatial separation of matter and antimatter in the early universe, explaining why we see only a small amount of antimatter in the universe around us. Most theories predict that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been produced during the Big Bang that birthed the universe.
The ALPHA collaboration at CERN suggested to Wurtele a new approach. By 2010, the ALPHA team was trapping significant quantities of antihydrogen atoms, and in 2011, Wurtele insisted to Fajans that since antihydrogen is charge neutral, it would not be affected by electric fields, and they should explore the possibility of a gravity measurement.
UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Danielle Hodgkinson, right, running the ALPHA-g experiment from the control room at CERN in Switzerland. Credit: Joel Fajans, UC Berkeley The experiment is like a standard balance used to compare very similar weights, Fajans said. The magnetic balance makes the relatively tiny gravitational force visible in the presence of much larger magnetic forces, much the same way that a normal balance makes visible the difference between 1 kilogram and 1.001 kilograms.
The results had to be treated statistically because of the many unknowns: The researchers couldn't be certain how many antihydrogen atoms they'd trapped, they couldn't be sure they detected every annihilation, they couldn't be sure there were not some unknown magnetic fields that would have affected the antiatom trajectories, and they couldn't be sure they'd measured the magnetic field in the bottle correctly.
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