Antimatter's Magnetic Charge Revealed: New Clues about the Nature of Matter

A team of Harvard scientists have successfully made the most accurate measurements to date of the magnetic charge of single particles of matter and its mysteriously counterpart, antimatter. The breakthrough could one day yield important clues about the nature of matter itself.

When the universe was first formed, the same amount of matter and antimatter was produced during the Big Bang. Yet scientists are baffled by the very fact that when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate one another.

"As the universe cools down, the big mystery is: Why didn't all the matter find the antimatter and annihilate all of both? There's a lot of matter and no antimatter left, and we don't know why," said Gerald Gabrielse, the lead researcher in a statement.

The research, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, employed a method to capture individual proton and antiprotons in a "trap" created by electric and magnetic fields. By precisely measuring the oscillations of each particle, the researchers were able to measure the magnetism of a proton more than 1,000 times more accurately than an antiproton had been measured before. Similar tests with antiprotons produced a 680-fold increase in accuracy.

These precise measurements of protons and antiprotons could begin to answer questions about the origins of the universe and how it works. It could also potentially shed new light on whether the CPT (Charge conjugation, Party transformation, Time reversal) theorem is correct. This theorem states that the protons and antiprotons should be virtually identical with the same magnitude of charge and mass, but with opposite charges.

"What's also very exciting about this breakthrough is that it now prepares us to continue down this road," Gabrielse said in a statement. "I'm confident that, given this start, we're going to be able to increase the accuracy of these measurements by another factor of 1,000, or even 10,000."

Moving forward, the researchers hope to continue refining their accuracy and hopefully pave the way to learning more about the universe.