June 6, 2011 (PostMedia News) -- Makoto Fujiwara has spent more than a decade in laboratories hunting an elusive prey, the stuff of science fiction -- the missing half of everything.
He and other Canadian researchers have finally managed to trap their lightning in a bottle. Only it isn't lightning they've got in the bottle -- it's antimatter.
In a paper appearing online Sunday in the journal Nature Physics, lead author Fujiwara and his colleagues say they've succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for more than 16 minutes -- virtually an eternity for a rare substance that scientists have struggled to keep intact for more than a few fractions of a second.
"It's a kind of game-changer," said Fujiwara, a researcher at the Vancouver-based TRIUMF, a laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, and an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary.
