[Al Jazeera] Physicists have created, and for the first time trapped, antimatter atoms, one of the biggest mysteries of modern science, the European Centre for Nuclear Research says.The Switzerland-based research institute, also known as CERN, said on Wednesday it had produced antihydrogen atoms - the opposite of a hydrogen atom - in a magnetic trap and kept them viable for more than 170 milliseconds.
Holding the antimatter in a vacuum for this fraction of a second allowed the physicists to study the atoms, CERN said in an article in the British journal Nature.
"We're ecstatic. This is five years of hard work," Jeffrey Hangst, a spokesman at CERN, told the journal.
An antihydrogen atom is made from a negatively charged antiproton and a positively charged positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron.
Experiments have produced antimatter atoms before but only in a free state. That means they instantly collide with ordinary matter and get annihilated, making it impossible to measure them or study their structure.
"The goal is to study antihydrogen and you can't do it without trapping it," Cliff Surko, an antimatter researcher at the University of California, San Diego, said in Nature.
"This is really a big deal."