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“This paper marks the transition; we’re saying we’ve done this, we’re ready to go to this next stage.”

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Antimatter is just as it sounds, the opposite of stuff. Matter is made of particles, and antimatter is made of antiparticles, which behave in exactly the opposite fashion. Where matter zigs, antimatter zags, and if they happen to meet, they annihilate each other in a flash of energy.

The big question is why there is so much more matter than anti-matter. In other words, why is the universe the way it is, as opposed to just a big flash of light, with nothing left over?

With a reputation like kryptonite, antimatter naturally figures prominently in pop culture, notably Star Trek, in which it plays a fuel source, and Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, in which it plays a weapon.

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Predicted in theory by quantum pioneer Paul Dirac in 1930, antimatter was first discovered three years later, in the form of positrons, or anti-electrons. Antihydrogen, which like regular hydrogen is a simple system of one anti-proton and one anti-electron, was first produced in 1990s, but only at very high energies — so hot and fast that scientists caught the merest glimpse before it touched matter and vanished.

Holding antimatter steady therefore became the goal that has just been achieved.

In this new experiment, a cloud of anti-protons was mingled with a cloud of anti-electrons to form a cloud of anti-hydrogen atoms, trapped inside a cucumber-sized cylinder surrounded by massive superconducting magnets and sensitive silicon detectors, in the CERN laboratory in Geneva.