Physicists find ways to increase antihydrogen production

There are many experiments that physicists would like to perform on antimatter, from studying its properties with spectroscopic measurements to testing how it interacts with gravity. But in order to perform these experiments, scientists first need some antimatter. Of course, they won't be finding any in nature (due to antimatter's tendency to annihilate in a burst of energy when it comes in contact with ordinary matter), and creating it in the lab has proven to be very technically challenging for the same reasons.

Now in a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, Alisher S. Kadyrov, et al., at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and Swansea University in the UK, have theoretically found a method to enhance the rate of antihydrogen production by several orders of magnitude. They hope that their finding will guide antihydrogen programs toward achieving the production of large amounts of antihydrogen for long confinement times, and at cool temperatures, as required by future investigative experiments.