Make way for the antimatter gun. A tabletop device just 10 square metres in size can spit out energetic bursts of positrons as dense as those kicked out by the giant particle-factories at CERN.
Each positron-packed bullet lasts for just a fraction of a second, so don't expect to fill the tank of your antimatter engine any time soon. Instead the smaller, cheaper machine might help labs around the world study deep-space objects such as powerful radiation jets squirted out by black holes.
Antiparticles have the same mass as their ordinary particle counterparts but carry an opposite charge and spin. The particles annihilate on contact with ordinary matter, vanishing in a puff of energy, which makes it difficult to produce and study them on Earth.
Huge machines at particle physics labs, such as CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, have been churning out antimatter for over a decade. But it is an expensive pursuit that, for CERN, requires a 190-metre-long track.
Instead, Gianluca Sarri at Queen's University Belfast, UK, and colleagues used rapid laser bursts to make positrons in their smaller, budget device. The laser pulse ionises inert helium gas, generating a stream of high-speed electrons. This electron beam is directed at a thin metallic foil so that it crashes into metal atoms, releasing a jet of electrons and positrons. These particles are separated into two beams with magnets (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/m2n).
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