For those of you familiar with the works of author Dan Brown, the name CERN should pop off the page instantly.
The company, whose acronym stands for the European Organization for Nuclear Research and which was made famous through its literary depiction in Brown's novel "Angels & Demons," uses its laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border to conduct research of fundamental physics and the mechanics of the physical universe.
The ALPHA experiment, one of the company's more ambitious endeavors, may be the closest to actually achieving this goal.
Earlier this month, researchers involved with the ALPHA experiment succeeded in trapping antimatter for more than 16 minutes using an antiproton decelerator.
"We can keep the antihydrogen atoms trapped for 1,000 seconds," explained ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst in a press release. "This is long enough to begin to study them, even with the small number that we can catch so far."
Antimatter, as science fiction geeks and Tom Hanks fans will recall, is a highly unstable energy that exists in direct opposition to matter (i.e., everything), and therefore is extremely destructive if brought into contact with matter.
Ever see what happens when you get a horizontal line of connecting tiles in Tetris? The same principle applies here.
Using magnetic fields to trap and suspend the antimatter, the researchers were able to begin studying the "anti-atoms" within it, which may provide clues as to why antimatter is so rare.
It also may illuminate the truth behind the long-held CPT theory, which concerns the fundamental symmetry of the universe according to change, parity and time.
According to the theory as stated in a press release, "a particle moving forward through time in our universe should be indistinguishable from an antiparticle moving backwards through time in a mirror universe."
"Any hint of CPT symmetry breaking would require a serious rethink of our understanding of nature," Hangst said.
So while CERN might not yet be able to create the magnificent doomsday device envisioned by one of the most commercialized authors of recent memory, the company has still managed to contain the material just long enough to begin collecting the puzzle pieces for one more crack at the mysteries of the universe.
