This week the ALPHA collaboration, of which I am a part, published an article in Nature detailing the first ever observation of the hyperfine structure in antihydrogen.  We don’t know why there is so little antimatter compared to matter in the universe.  Studying antihydrogen (the simplest anti-atom) could provide evidence as to why the disparity exists.  The word “hyperfine structure” means exactly what it sounds like: extremely small details in the atomic structure of antihydrogen.  The more detailed analysis we can perform on antimatter, the more likely we are to find differences between matter and antimatter, if they exist at all.

Members of the ALPHA-Canada team at Simon Fraser University who led this spectroscopy experiment give a great comparison between an atom’s spectral lines and fingerprints.  Physics theories predict that atoms have a different “fingerprint,” except an atom and its antiatom counterpart.  This means that hydrogen atoms and antihydrogen atoms need to be exactly the same – or there’s something wrong with our theories.  Until now, we haven’t been able to confirm these theories on such a precise scale.  To learn more, check out this article posted by CERN.