An experiment conducted on hybrid matter-antimatter atoms has defied researchers’ expectations.
, an atomic physicist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria who was not involved with the research. He anticipates that the result will lead to a new way to capture and scrutinize elusive forms of matter. “Their community will find more exciting possibilities to trap exotic things.”One way to gauge the properties of atoms and their components is to tickle them with a laser and see what happens, a technique called laser spectroscopy.
Spectroscopy practitioners like Hori spend their careers fighting this “broadening” of spectral lines. For instance, they might employ thinner gases where atomic collisions will be rarer—and energy levels will stay more pristine., at the time a graduate student of Hori’s, initially seemed counterintuitive.. The group would assemble hybrid matter-antimatter atoms by firing antiprotons into liquid helium.
“It was a random idea from my side,” said Sótér, now a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. “People were not convinced it was worth it to waste antiprotons on it.” “We continued to argue for many years,” Hori said. “It was not so easy for me to understand why this was the case.”In time, the researchers concluded that nothing had gone awry. The tight spectral line showed that the hybrid atoms in superfluid helium aren’t experiencing atomic collisions in the billiard-ball manner that’s typical in a gas. The question was why. After consulting with various theorists, the researchers landed on two possible reasons.
In a normal atom, a tiny electron can venture far from its host atom, especially when excited by a laser. On such a loose leash, the electron can easily bump into other atoms, disturbing its atom’s intrinsic energy levels .
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