Antimatter was first predicted in 1931, by Dirac. Work with high-energy antiparticles is now commonplace, and anti-electrons are used regularly in the medical technique of positron emission tomography scanning. Antihydrogen, the bound state of an antiproton and a positron, has been produced at low energies at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) since 2002. Antihydrogen is of interest for use in a precision test of nature's fundamental symmetries. The charge conjugation/parity/time reversal (CPT) theorem, a crucial part of the foundation of the standard model of elementary particles and interactions, demands that hydrogen and antihydrogen have the same spectrum. Given the current experimental precision of measurements on the hydrogen atom (about two parts in 10(14) for the frequency of the 1s-to-2s transition), subjecting antihydrogen to rigorous spectroscopic examination would constitute a compelling, model-independent test of CPT. Antihydrogen could also be used to study the gravitational behaviour of antimatter. However, so far experiments have produced antihydrogen that is not confined, precluding detailed study of its structure. Here we demonstrate trapping of antihydrogen atoms. From the interaction of about 10(7) antiprotons and 7 × 10(8) positrons, we observed 38 annihilation events consistent with the controlled release of trapped antihydrogen from our magnetic trap; the measured background is 1.4 ± 1.4 events. This result opens the door to precision measurements on anti-atoms, which can soon be subjected to the same techniques as developed for hydrogen.

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Physicists have long wondered whether the gravitational interactions between matter and antimatter might be different from those between matter and itself. Although there are many indirect indications that no such differences exist and that the weak equivalence principle holds, there have been no direct, free-fall style, experimental tests of gravity on antimatter. Here we describe a novel direct test methodology; we search for a propensity for antihydrogen atoms to fall downward when released from the ALPHA antihydrogen trap. In the absence of systematic errors, we can reject ratios of the gravitational to inertial mass of antihydrogen >75 at a statistical significance level of 5%; worst-case systematic errors increase the minimum rejection ratio to 110. A similar search places somewhat tighter bounds on a negative gravitational mass, that is, on antigravity. This methodology, coupled with ongoing experimental improvements, should allow us to bound the ratio within the more interesting near equivalence regime.

SummaryIn tropical and subtropical oceanic surface waters phosphate scarcity can limit microbial productivity. However, these environments also have bioavailable forms of phosphorus incorporated into dissolved organic matter (DOM) that microbes with the necessary transport and hydrolysis metabolic pathways can access to supplement their phosphorus requirements. In this study we evaluated how the environment shapes the abundance and taxonomic distribution of the bacterial carbon–phosphorus (C–P) lyase pathway, an enzyme complex evolved to extract phosphate from phosphonates. Phosphonates are organophosphorus compounds characterized by a highly stable C–P bond and are enriched in marine DOM. Similar to other known bacterial adaptions to low phosphate environments, C–P lyase was found to become more prevalent as phosphate concentrations decreased. C–P lyase was particularly enriched in the Mediterranean Sea and North Atlantic Ocean, two regions that feature sustained periods of phosphate depletion. In these regions, C–P lyase was prevalent in several lineages of Alphaproteobacteria (Pelagibacter, SAR116, Roseobacter and Rhodospirillales), Gammaproteobacteria, and Actinobacteria. The global scope of this analysis supports previous studies that infer phosphonate catabolism via C–P lyase is an important adaptive strategy implemented by bacteria to alleviate phosphate limitation and expands the known geographic extent and taxonomic affiliation of this metabolic pathway in the ocean.

Reported trapping times of magnetically confined (matter) atoms range from <1 s in the first, room temperature, traps [ 18 ] to 10 to 30 minutes in cryogenic devices [ 19,20,21,22 ]. However, antimatter atoms can annihilate on background gases. Also, the loading of our trap (i.e., anti-atom production via merging of cold plasmas) is different from that of ordinary atom traps, and the loading dynamics could adversely affect the trapping and orbit dynamics. Mechanisms exist for temporary magnetic trapping of particles (e.g., in quasi-stable trapping orbits [ 23 ], or in excited internal states [ 24 ]); such particles could be short-lived with a trapping time of a few 100 ms. Thus, it is not a priori obvious what trapping time should be expected for antihydrogen. 5In this article, we report the first systematic investigations of the characteristics of trapped antihydrogen. These studies were made possible by significant advances in our trapping techniques subsequent to Ref. [ 17 ]. These developments, including incorporation of evaporative antiproton cooling[ 25 ] into our trapping operation, and optimisation of autoresonant mixing [ 26 ], resulted in up to a factor of five increase in the number of trapped atoms per attempt. A total sample of 309 trapped antihydrogen annihilation events was studied, a large increase from the previously published 38 events.Here we report trapping of antihydrogen for 1000 s, extending earlier results [ 17 ] by nearly four orders of magnitude. Further, we have exploited the temporal and spatial resolution of our detector system to perform a detailed analysis of the antihydrogen release process, from which we infer information on the trapped antihydrogen kinetic energy distribution.The ALPHA antihydrogen trap [ 27,28 ] is comprised of the superposition of a Penning trap for antihydrogen production and a magnetic field configuration that has a three-dimensional minimum in magnitude (Fig. 1). For ground-state antihydrogen, our trap well-depth is 0.54 K (in temperature units).The large discrepancy in the energy scales between the magnetic trap depth (~50 eV), and the characteristic energy scale of the trapped plasmas (a few eV) presents a formidable challenge to trapping neutral anti-atoms. antiprotons at ~100K, with radius 0.4 mm and density 7x10 7 cm -3 is prepared for mixing with positrons.Independently, the positron plasma, accumulated in a Surko-type buffer gas accumulator [ 33 ,34 ], is transferred to the mixing region, and is also radially compressed. The magnetic trap is then energized, 6 and the positron plasma is cooled further via evaporation, resulting in a plasma with a radius of 0.8 mm and containing 1x10 6 positrons at a density of 5x10 7 cm -3 and a temperature of ~40 K. The silicon vertex detector, surrounding the mixing trap in three layers (Fig. 1 a) ]. Knowledge of annihilation positions also provides sensitivity to the antihydrogen energy distribution, as we will show.In Table 1 and Fig. 2, we present the results for a series of measurements, wherein the confinemen...