COLLEGE STATION, Texas, March 4 (UPI) -- Physicists using a collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., say they have created what in essence is a new form of matter.
The international team of scientists from 54 institutions in 13 countries said the anti-hypertrition particle they created is believed to have been in existence immediately after the "big bang," and its creation in the laboratory could lead to new questions and answers about some of the basic laws of physics.
The never-seen-before particle was produced by colliding gold nuclei at speeds just short of the speed of light.
"By accelerating the gold (gold was selected because it is very heavy) at extremely high speeds, we were able to replicate the conditions right after the big bang," said Texas A&M Professor Carl Gagliardi. "At a temperature of about 2 trillion degrees, which is about 100,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun, we were able to produce a new form of matter."
Theoretical physicist Horst Stoecker, vice president of the Helmholtz Association of German National Laboratories, said the achievement might have "unprecedented consequences" for scientists' view of the world. "This antimatter pushes open the door to new dimensions in the nuclear chart -- an idea that just a few years ago would have been viewed as impossible," he said.
The work appears online in the journal Science Express, prior to print in the journal Science.
