GENEVA — Scientists may have been able to capture elusive atoms of antimatter, but don’t expect that to lead to interstellar rocket engines or powerful bombs anytime soon — if ever.
Even as they announced the important advance in studying antimatter, they emphasized that science-fiction uses of the stuff — such as propelling the starship Enterprise in “Star Trek” or fueling a bomb in Dan Brown’s book “Angels and Demons” — remain in the realm of the imagination.
International physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said they had overcome a basic problem in studying atoms of antimatter. While such atoms have been created routinely in the lab for years, they tend to disappear so fast that scientists don’t have a chance to study them.
But in a report published online by the journal Nature, the scientists said they had been able to trap individual atoms and keep them around for a bit more than one-tenth of a second. To a particle physicist, that’s a pretty long time.
“For us it’s a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter,” the team’s spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, said Thursday.
