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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