Physicists working in Europe announced yesterday that they had passed through nature's looking glass and had created atoms made of antimatter, or antiatoms, opening up the possibility of experiments in a realm once reserved for science fiction writers. Such experiments, theorists say, could test some of the basic tenets of modern physics and light the way to a deeper understanding of nature.
This is fascinating, if arcane, stuff. Using an ingenious sequence of "catching" and "mixing" traps made of magnetic fields, the scientists superimposed clouds of anti-protons and anti-electrons. Although they couldn't observe the the anti-hydrogen directly, the characteristic signature of its destruction was evident as the atoms collided with the regular matter of the chamber's walls in a shower of pions and gamma rays.
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