When matter and antimatter collide

Antimatter, a substance that often features in science fiction, is routinely created at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, to provide us with a better understanding of atoms and molecules. Now, Japanese scientists at RIKEN, as part of a collaborative team with researchers from Denmark, Japan, the United Kingdom and Hungary, have shown that antiprotons—particles with the same mass as a proton but negatively charged—collide with molecules in a very different way from their interaction with atoms. The result sets an important benchmark for testing future atomic-collision theories.