Technical tour-de-force traps positrons

Enlarge / An abstract illustration of high-energy subatomic particles colliding. (credit: Girolamo Sferrazza Papa | Getty Images)

We don't often play with them, but plasmas are a central part of modern life. The plasmas that we can create on Earth, however, are unlike some of the plasmas that are thought to exist in space-the ones in space appear to include antimatter. Those plasmas are hard to observe, and as a result, we don't think we understand them very well.

That makes a pair of recent publications on the trapping of positrons-the positively charged cousin to the electron-very interesting. While they don't get as far as exploring plasmas with antimatter, they do show that we can trap the antimatter long enough to make some.

Plasma: A fluid that is not a fluid

Before we get to the good stuff, we need to trudge through some well-explored fields. A plasma is basically a gas, but the gas consists of ions-atoms that have had one or more electrons removed-and free electrons.

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