I found this animation about anti-hydrogen production (sound is bad, though):
http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/cern/tools/animation.html

These are interesting lines of research. The problem of using antimatter as fuel for starships lies in the difficulty of storing and transporting antimatter: It has to be suspended in a vacuum electromagnetically, which severely limits the amount that can be carried. If, however, we were to find a way forming stable chemical bonds between matter and antimatter attoms, this could be used in fuel pellets that contain both "reactants".

The problem, the way I see it, is that the positron shell of an antimatter atom, being positively charged, would not form a stable bond with the negatively charged, electron shells of matter atoms. What we'd need to create is either antimatter atoms that have positively charged anti-particles as nuclei and negatively charged anti-particles in the outer shell, or else create matter "atoms" that are similarly reversed: Negative nuclei, positive shell. Assuming a need to have lighter particles in the outer shell, we'd have to use one or more massive, but negatively charged particles for the nucleus, and one or more lightweight, but positively charged particles for the shell.

The latter option would result in hard to handle materials, though, so let me go back to the first option: Flipped antimatter atoms, with positive nuclei and negative shell, bonded to regular matter atoms.

Not sure how possible that is, I'm just brainstorming...

Another question that pops in my mind is, what about injecting anti-neutrons into light isotopes of matter? "Anti-enrichment"?
An anti-neutron is not a contradiction, by the way. Regular matter neutrons decay into a proton, an anti-electron and something else, I think it was some kind of neutrino. An anti-neutron would decay into an anti-proton, and electron, etceteras. Now the question is, would the strong force work to keep protons and antineutrons together, forming (semi-) stable nuclei?

So this "protonium" stuff is like a regular hydrogen atom with the electron replaced with an antiproton? That's interesting, but what would be even more interesting is if they found a way of getting it to react chemically with regular old hydrogen or even something like chlorine or fluorine.

There's stuff called Muonium, which consists of an electron orbiting a positively charged muon that lasts for a few milliseconds. It's about a ninth as heavy as hydrogen, and its reactions with chlorine have been observed.

BBC on Change Parity

i am not a physicist, however i think the Change Parity Violation is proven, and another link i lost says the whole idea now is that matter and antimatter are capable of changing from one to the other, so annihilation might also have happened, however the simple answer from CP violation is that the presence of matter could also be a result of changing antimatter into matter without annihilation...

so if antimatter had won, we would still look like we do now, except we would all be left handed :) or maybe something in the isomer states of chemistry would say R-Arginine instead of L-Arginine or D-Arginine ??
dean.pku.edu.cn/bksky/1999jzlwj/32.doc

http://www.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/05/2.html

The great physicist, Richard Feynman, told a story to illustrate this point: suppose you were in two-way contact with some alien species, but only by "telegraph" (i.e., light flashes or radio signals). The well known procedures of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), starting with prime numbers and progressing to pictures, physics, and chemistry information could be used to develop a common language and arrive at a good level of communication. You could tell the alien how tall you are by expressing your height in mutually understood wavelengths of light. You could tell the alien how old you are as some large number of ticks of a light-frequency clock. Now you want to explain how humans shake hands when they meet, and you describe extending your right hand. "Wait a moment!" says the alien. "What do you mean by ‘right’?"

Tiare, i am slowly comming around to the idea of anit matter. Having read both the articles, i still think that it is a new field of science and because it is at a very early stage i would give it the benifit of the doubt.

It still sounds like rubbish. It is still trying to put a physical explaination on something nobody can yet prove. 100 years from now the science comunity will read the same article and laugh at how we were in the dark ages back in the year 2006. But it least sombody is making a start.

Roll on the LHC at CERN. The only instrument that might have some answers.

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more about this news here

T R.-

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My photography world

I read it 2 1/2 times and still don't know what it said. Being able to make a collection of antiprotons doesn't sound like much of a breakthrough. Where is any aspect of chemistry, and how big is a "zillionth"? I'm probably being too critical but the article didn't teach me anything.

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Err.... chemical reactions between antimatter and matter???

These are *nuclear* reactions, not "chemical" ones, which are about electron *bonds* between atoms/molecules.

Thanks, Tiare, was a nice and interesting read... :)
P.S.: Ellie rulez! :)))

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"The Truth Is Out There!" (X-Files)

Physorg.com; October 20, 2006

Antiprotonic hydrogen has already been produced

This new way of producing antiprotonic hydrogen, is called protonium.

These antihydrogen atoms represent the simplest “chemical” structure made of antimatter, as atomic hydrogen is the simplest “chemical” structure in our usual “matter” world. Now, the work of the ATHENA collaboration has been focused on the production of the antiprotonic hydrogen by a chemical reaction between matter and antimatter. “This production was totally unexpected and increases by far the number of important results achieved in our work,” says Zurlo.

Being able to cause chemical reactions between matter and antimatter can broaden our understanding of natural laws.

Full Story here

Greetings
Tiare R.-

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My photography world