Antimatter atoms are corralled even longer

Scientists have succeeded in trapping atoms of anti-hydrogen for more than 15 minutes.

The feat is a big improvement on efforts reported last year that could corral this mirror of normal hydrogen for just fractions of a second at best.The researchers tell Nature Physics journal that they can now probe the properties of antimatter in detail.
This will help them understand why the Universe is composed of normal matter rather than its opposite.
The laws of physics appear to make no distinction between the two and equal amounts should have been created at the Big Bang."We have improved the efficiency of trapping compared with what we published last November," said Jeffrey Hangst, who works on the Alpha collaboration at the Cern particle physics laboratory in Switzerland.
"In order to make these studies, it surely helps to have more atoms and we've made an improvement of about a factor of five. We announced 38 trapped atoms [last year]; we've now studied about 300 which have been held for varying amounts of time."

The team uses an ultra-cold magnetic trap