The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, currently lies in pieces, with engineers working on boosting its power. At the same time, in a side hall, an upgrade is taking place to an experiment that may allow physicists to measure the properties of atoms of antimatter. It is a goal that researchers have been chasing since the first antihydrogen atoms were made at CERN in 1995. An antihydrogen atom consists of an antiproton and a positron, which respectively have the same mass as an ordinary proton and electron, but opposite charge. Beyond that, researchers know very little about antihydrogen. "Do matter and antimatter atoms obey the same laws of physics?" asks Jeffrey Hangst, spokesman for ALPHA, one of the collaborative efforts to make and analyse antihydrogen.
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