Matter and antimatter violently annihilate each other. If they’re absolutely symmetrical, then maybe — just maybe — the universe shouldn’t exist. 
 
 Just like there is matter in the universe (pretty much everything that exists), there is also antimatter. Basically, all particles have a corresponding anti-particle — with the same mass, but opposite electric charge, and other differences in quantum parameters. The proton, for instance, has a positive charge, while the antiproton has a negative charge. When a proton and an antiproton collide, they annihilate each other in a violent outburst. 
 
 Researchers at CERN in Switzerland have made the most precise measurement ever of the magnetic moment of an antiproton. The magnetic moment determines how a particle reacts to an external magnetic force. They found that the two moments are absolutely identical but with an opposite sign. This is really problematic. 
 
 “All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” says Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN’s Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is.” “It is probably the first time that physicists get a more precise measurement for antimatter than for matter, which demonstrates the extraordinary progress accomplished at CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator,” added Smorra, who is first-author of the study. 
 
 Since matter and antimatter annihilate themselves and the universe exists and hasn’t annihilated itself (yet), there’s good reason to believe that there is much more matter than antimatter in the universe. But why? There must be some discrepancy in the parameters of these particles that allows matter to dominate, but researchers haven’t found it yet. It’s like playing spot the difference at a particle level. 
 
 The work of Smorra and his colleagues is an elegant design, a two-particle measurement method developed in Stefan Ulmer’s RIKEN laboratory. Researchers simultaneously capture and measure two separate antiprotons one at a high temperature (350 degrees Kelvin / 76 C / 170 F) and the other at a very cold temperature (0.15 K / -273 C / -459 F), very close to absolute zero. The first particle is used for calibration, while the colder one is used to measure a parameter called the Larmor frequency, which governs how a particle precesses (rotates and spins) under a magnetic influence. Even doing this for protons was a breakthrough (published in Nature in 2014), but doing it for antiprotons is a whole new ball game. 
 
 With this method, they managed to keep an antiproton captured for inside a special chamber about as big as a tall pint. Measurements were incredibly accurate, indicating a value for the antiproton magnetic moment of −2.7928473441 μ N (μ N is a constant called the nuclear magneton). Precise to nine significant digits, this measurement is 350 times more accurate than the previous measurement. It’s the equivalent of measuring the Earth’s circumference to a few centimeters. 
 
 Their results are identical to those obtained for the proton, aside from the minus sign. 
 
 “It is probably the first time that physicists get a more precise measurement for antimatter than for matter, which demonstrates the extraordinary progress accomplished at CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator, ” added first-author of the study Christian Smorra. 
 
 However, for all these elegant improvements, they still couldn’t answer the fundamental question of why our universe exists — why matter and antimatter are so unevenly distributed through the universe, allowing us to exist. Still, Smorra says that they can still improve significantly. 
 
 “By upgrading the experiment with several new technical innovations, we feel that some further improvement can still be made, and in the future, following the CERN upgrade expected to finish in 2021, we will be able to achieve an at least ten-fold improvement.” 
 
 In the meantime, nature continues to consist of matter and we still don’t know why there’s not much antimatter around. Researchers continue to try and solve this mystery which could unlock one of the keys to understanding the universe. 
 
 Enjoyed this article? Join 40,000+ subscribers to the ZME Science newsletter. Subscribe now! ||||| One of the great mysteries of modern physics is why antimatter did not destroy the universe at the beginning of time. 
 
 To explain it, physicists suppose there must be some difference between matter and antimatter – apart from electric charge. Whatever that difference is, it’s not in their magnetism, it seems. 
 
 Physicists at CERN in Switzerland have made the most precise measurement ever of the magnetic moment of an anti-proton – a number that measures how a particle reacts to magnetic force – and found it to be exactly the same as that of the proton but with opposite sign. The work is described in Nature. 
 
 “All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” says Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN’s Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is.” 
 
 Antimatter is notoriously unstable – any contact with regular matter and it annihilates in a burst of pure energy that is the most efficient reaction known to physics. That’s why it was chosen as the fuel to power the starship Enterprise in Star Trek. 
 
 The standard model predicts the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter – but that’s a combustive mixture that would have annihilated itself, leaving nothing behind to make galaxies or planets or people. Recommended Laser excites antimatter atoms for first time Physics 
 
 To explain the mystery, physicists have been playing spot the difference between matter and antimatter – searching for some discrepancy that might explain why matter came to dominate. 
 
 So far they’ve performed extremely precise measurements for all sort of properties: mass, electric charge and so on, but no difference has yet been found. 
 
 Last year, scientists at CERN’s Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus (ALPHA) experiment probed an atom of anti-hydrogen with light for the first time, again finding no difference when compared with an atom of hydrogen. 
 
 But one property was known only to middling accuracy compared to the others – the magnetic moment of the antiproton. 
 
 Ten years ago, Stefan Ulmer and his team at BASE collaboration set themselves the task of trying to measure it. 
 
 First they had to develop a way to directly measure the magnetic moment of the regular proton. They did this by trapping individual protons in a magnetic field, and driving quantum jumps in its spin using another magnetic field. This measurement was itself a groundbreaking achievement reported in Nature in 2014. 
 
 Next, they had to perform the same measurement on antiprotons – a task made doubly difficult by the fact that antiprotons will immediately annihilate on contact with any matter. 
 
 To do it, the team used the coldest and longest-lived antimatter ever created. 
 
 After creating the antiprotons in 2015, the team were able to store them for more than a year inside a special chamber about the size and shape of a can of Pringles. 
 
 Since no physical container can hold antimatter, physicists use magnetic and electric fields to contain the material in devices called Penning traps. 
 
 Usually the antimatter lifetime is limited by imperfections in the traps – little instabilities allow the antimatter to leak through. 
 
 But by using a combination of two traps, the BASE team made the most perfect antimatter chamber ever – holding the antiprotons for 405 days. 
 
 This stable storage allowed them to run their magnetic moment measurement on the antiprotons. The result gave a value for the antiproton magnetic moment of −2.7928473441 μ N . (μ N is a constant called the nuclear magneton.) Apart from the minus sign, this is identical to the previous measurement for the proton. 
 
 The new measurement is precise to nine significant digits, the equivalent of measuring the circumference of the Earth to within a few centimeters, and 350 times more precise than any previous measurement. 
 
 “This result is the culmination of many years of continuous research and development, and the successful completion of one of the most difficult measurements ever performed in a Penning trap instrument,” says Ulmer. 
 
 The universe’s greatest game of spot the difference goes on. The next hotly anticipated experiment is over at ALPHA, where CERN scientists are studying the effect of gravity of antimatter – trying to answer the question of whether antimatter might fall ‘up’. ||||| A new super-precise measurement from the RIKEN-led BASE collaboration, which also includes researchers from the University of Tokyo, Japan, the Max Planck Institute for nuclear physics, Heidelberg, the University of Mainz, the University of Hannover and GSI Darmstadt, Germany, has placed new constraints on the difference between matter and antimatter, as part of the quest to discover why our Universe is almost only composed of matter. Using a novel two-particle measurement method, the group measured the magnetic moment of the antiproton at a precision 350 times higher than any previous measurement. The result, published in Nature, shows that the magnetic moments of the proton and antiproton are tremendously close, meaning that so-called CPT asymmetry--a key factor in the lack of antimatter--must be very small if it exists at all. CPT symmetry refers to the idea that if particles change in two of three properties--charge, parity, and time--must also change in the third, and is critical in understanding the imbalance between matter and antimatter. 
 
 To perform the measurement, the group used a novel, elegant, two particle measurement method developed in Stefan Ulmer's RIKEN laboratory, which is a further advance of a two-trap method previously developed at the University of Mainz. The system involves the simultaneous trapping and measurement within an even magnetic field of two separate antiprotons--one measured at a relatively high temperature of about 350 degrees Kelvin--a temperature equivalent to hot water--and the other at just 0.15 K, extremely close to absolute zero. The first antiproton is used to calibrate the magnetic field, by measuring a property called the "cyclotron frequency," while the other is used to measure a quality known as the Larmor frequency, which looks at the precession of the particle's spin, allowing precise measurements of the magnetic moment. 
 
 Using this new method, they found that the magnetic moment of the antiproton is 2.792 847 344 1(42), a value extremely close to the figure of 2.792 847 350(9) that the same collaboration of researchers found for the proton in 2014. In addition to showing that they are so close, the results also put strict limits on the possibility that a difference in the magnetic moments could be based on factors that, at the high energies that existed in the early universe, could have caused a process of "spontaneous symmetry breaking" leading to differences in matter and antimatter. 
 
 According to Ulmer, "With these results, we have shown, as has been demonstrated with other properties of a variety of particles, that CPT invariance seems to hold at very high precision, as the magnetic moment of the proton and the antiproton still look identical, apart from the signs. This result is the culmination of many years of continuous research and development, and the successful completion of one of the most difficult measurements ever performed in a Penning trap instrument, with many parameters developed close to the principal technical limits." 
 
 Christian Smorra, first-author of the study adds, "By upgrading the experiment with several new technical innovations, we feel that some further improvement can still be made, and in the future, following the CERN upgrade expected to finish in 2021, we will be able to achieve an at least ten-fold improvement." 
 
 The results were achieved soon before the next CERN shutdown, which is scheduled to last from 2019 to 2021. 
 
 ### ||||| The Canadian Press 
 
 VANCOUVER  Antimatter fuelled the Starship Enterprise to go where no man had gone before, but in reality it remained strictly in the realm of science fiction. 
 
 Until now. 
 
 In an article published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists explain how that fiction may have taken a step closer to fact with the creation of a type of magnetic bottle that can hold antimatter long enough for scientists to try to unlock the mystery of the antiatom. 
 
 About 15 Canadian experts from Simon Fraser University, the University of B.C., the University of Calgary, York University and the TRIUMF national research lab in Vancouver were part of the 42-person team to make the discovery in Geneva. 
 
 The exciting device has the usually sedate scientific world in a froth. 
 
 "This is really cool," said Marcello Pavan, a physicist with TRIUMF. "We're talking about trapping antiatoms for goodness sakes, this is, you know, Star Trek." 
 
 Scientists have been creating antimatter for 15 years, but it moves at about the speed of light and is quickly destroyed. Pavan said the magnetic bottle is able to capture antimatter for about one-tenth of a second before it self-destructs. 
 
 "This is science fiction become science fact," he said in an interview Wednesday. 
 
 Antimatter is one of the mysteries of science. 
 
 Matter is essentially anything that has mass and occupies space -- basically everything on Earth. 
 
 It's believed matter and antimatter are identical, except that they have an opposite charge and antimatter destroys itself almost immediately. 
 
 Now that they can see antimatter, scientists might be able to answer some of the questions about any differences between the two. 
 
 Pavan said the amazing device may give some insight into what happened after the Big Bang created the universe. 
 
 Physicists have always theorized that when the universe came into being an equal amount of matter and antimatter was created, but all the antimatter disappeared. 
 
 "This is like the 900-pound elephant sitting on your couch, you can't ignore it, the fact that we don't know what on earth happened to all this antimatter, which should have been created at the Big Bang," Pavan said. 
 
 The project, called the ALPHA Collaboration, was based at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland. CERN is probably best known for its large Hadron Collider, a giant white donut-like structure that is the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator. 
 
 The antiatoms are produced in a vacuum at CERN and the life of the antiatom was extended in the bottle, which is the size of about two of the tubes from inside a roll of paper towels. 
 
 In Geneva, Simon Fraser University physics professor Michael Hayden was just heading out Wednesday to celebrate the release of the group's findings. 
 
 Hayden said the goal of the creation is to answer a very fundamental question: What happened to all the antimatter? 
 
 "It's a very fundamental question. If we look at the universe around us we see that -- as far as we can tell -- it's composed of matter. Antimatter just isn't there," he said. 
 
 Because the hydrogen atom is so well known to scientists, Hayden said they're now comparing that with antihydrogen, something they know nothing about. 
 
 "We don't know where this is going to lead. But the ultimate motivation is really to try to address this question: why do we live in a universe composed of matter?"
– It's not often a new discovery has scientists sounding like a bunch of nihilists, and yet CERN physicist Christian Smorra had this to say to Cosmos regarding a study published this month in Nature: "All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist." Scientific models say the Big Bang produced an equal amount of matter and antimatter. But matter and antimatter destroy each other when they come in contact; an equal amount of each means the universe should have blinked out of existence in a burst of energy. But it hasn't, which means there must be some difference between the two to allow matter to dominate to the point where there is comparatively little antimatter in the universe, according to a press release. That's where CERN researchers come in. They've spent the past decade attempting to find a difference in the magnetism of matter and antimatter (it's not easy measuring something that destroys matter). That's resulted in a new measurement of the magnetic moment of an antiproton that is 350 times more accurate than the old measurement, ZME Science reports. It turns out the magnetic moment of an antiproton is ... pretty much exactly the same as that of a regular proton. Shoot. Smorra says a difference between matter and antimatter still must exist somewhere. Next up for CERN researchers is seeing if gravity affects protons and antiprotons differently. (Far from not existing, the universe actually contains way more galaxies than we thought.)