Antimatter Chemstry (For Small Values of Chemistry)

The AIP Physics News service last week highlighted a new result from the Athena collaboration at CERN with the headline “First Antimatter Chemistry”. That conjures images of sticking anti-carbon atoms together to make anti-buckballs, but that’s not exactly what’s going on…

The experiment in the case involves the interaction between anti-protons and molecular hydrogen ions. They slow and trap the anti-protons, and bring them into the same region with the H₂⁺ molecules, and a reaction occurs that pulls the molecule apart, producing a neutral hydrogen atom and something they’re calling “protonium,” a state with a proton and anti-proton bound together for a short time before they annihilate.

Now, I suppose this is technically chemistry, in some sense, as it features the interaction of a molecular ion with an atomic ion (an anti-proton is one positron short of anti-hydrogen, after all), but I think that’s stretching things a little. When I think of chemistry, I think of the interaction of whole atoms and molecules, usually in large numbers.

That’s nit-picking, though. It’s still pretty darn cool that they’re knocking anti-protons into other stuff– even though they’ve been manipulating anti-protons for decades, these experiments continue to have a faint whiff of SF about them, and that’s always fun, at least until Gregg Easterbrook reads about it, and starts nattering on about anti-matter weapons…