Anti-hydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy (AEgIS)

Sakshi Education

In a first, an international team of physicists from the Anti-hydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy (AEgIS) collaboration has achieved a breakthrough by demonstrating the laser cooling of Positronium.
It is an experiment approved by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) with the goal of studying antihydrogen physics.
The primary goal of AEgIS is the direct measurement of the Earth's gravitational acceleration, g, on antihydrogen.
Once performed this could be the first direct test of the gravitational interaction between matter and antimatter.
AEgIS is a collaboration of physicists from a number of countries in Europe and from India.
Antimatter is the same as ordinary matter except that it has the opposite electric charge.
It is also known as “mirror” matter.
For instance, an electron, which has a negative charge, has an antimatter partner known as a positron. A positron is a particle with the same mass as an electron but a positive charge.
The antimatter particles corresponding to electrons, protons, and neutrons are called positrons, antiprotons, and antineutrons; collectively they are referred to as antiparticles.
These anti-particles can combine to form anti-atoms and, in principle, could even form anti-matter regions of our universe.
Matter and antimatter cannot coexist at close range for more than a small fraction of a second because they collide with and annihilate each other, releasing large quantities of energy in the form of gamma rays or elementary particles.
Antimatter was created along with matter after the Big Bang.