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It’s extremely rare and usually exists for just 142 billionths of a second.
Positronium can generate huge amounts of energy. It can shed light on ‘antimatter’ which existed at the beginning of the Universe, and studying it could revolutionise physics, cancer treatment, and maybe even space travel.
But until now the elusive substance has been almost impossible to analyse because its atoms move around so much.
Now scientists have a workaround – freezing it with lasers.
“Physicists are in love with positronium,” said Dr Ruggero Caravita, spokesperson for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), near Geneva, where the experiment took place. “It is the perfect atom to do experiments with antimatter.”
“Now the entire field of study is unblocked.”
So what exactly is positronium?
It is a so-called exotic atom consisting of both matter and antimatter – so very unusual stuff indeed.
Matter is what the world around us is made from, including the stars, the planets and us.
Antimatter is its opposite. It was created in equal amounts when the Universe was born but exists only fleetingly in nature now, with very little of it occurring naturally in the cosmos.
Discovering why there is now more matter in the Universe now than antimatter – and therefore why we exist – will take us a long way toward a new, more complete theory of how the Universe evolved, and positronium could be the key, according to Lisa Gloggler, a Phd student working on the
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