Science Friday - Physicists Create Heaviest Antimatter Nucleus | Bird Species May Team Up For Migration

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

The heaviest antimatter nucleus to date was spotted in a particle accelerator. It could provide new insights into the nature of matter. And, research indicates different songbird species might intentionally travel together during migration, giving each other a possible boost in survival.Physicists Create Heaviest Antimatter Nucleus YetAntimatter is one of science’s great mysteries. It is produced all around us for fractions of a second, until it collides with matter, and the particles annihilate one another. But what is it?Antimatter is just like matter, except for one thing. Its particles have the same mass as ordinary matter, but an opposite charge. For example, an electron has a negative charge, so an anti-electron—called a positron—weighs the same, but has a positive charge.Antimatter is a natural product of some types of radioactive decay and cosmic ray collisions, but it can also be made in particle colliders here on Earth. But making antimatter particles this way is difficult and expensive—let alone controlling them enough to create an entire anti-atom. NASA estimates that creating a gram of antimatter would cost about $62.5 trillion.But why does antimatter matter? It may hold the key to understanding one of the universe’s biggest mysteries: why there’s something rather than nothing. Cosmologists say that during the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But everything around us today is mostly matter, meaning either that there was an excess of matter created, or that matter and antimatter don’t quite follow the rules physicists expect.Recently, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider spotted 16 instances of the heaviest exotic antimatter nucleus observed to date: antihyperhydrogen-4.To explore what this breakthrough means for antimatter research, SciFri producer Charles Bergquist talks to Dr. Jamie Dunlop, associate department chair for nuclear physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory.Different Bird Species May Team Up For MigrationThis season, billions of birds will take to the skies as they flock to their wintering grounds. With so many different species on the move, they’re bound to run into each other. A new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that this mixing and mingling might not be coincidental.In fact, different bird species could have their own social networks that might boost each others’ survival.SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with lead author Dr. Joely DeSimone, migration ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Appalachian Laboratory, about untangling avian relationships.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Have you ever heard of antimatter? Each particle has the same mass as ordinary matter, but an opposite charge. And one of physics's greatest puzzles is why there isn't more of it? That the universe is matter, not antimatter, is a fundamental mystery. It's Thursday, September 19th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm Valeria Diaz, Cyfry's Radio Production Fellow. Recently, scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory produced the heaviest exotic antimatter nucleus to date. Anti-hyperhydrogen 4. So what makes the nucleus so cool? And why should we

bother studying antimatter in the first place? But first, a new study reveals just how social bird migration can be. Here's Cyfry producer Kathleen Davis. This season, billions of birds will take to the skies as they flock to their wintering grounds. And with so many different species on the move, they're bound to run into each other. A new study suggests that this mixing and mingling might not be coincidental. In fact, different bird species could have their own social networks that might boost each other's survival. Joining me to talk about this is my guest, Dr. Jolie Desimony, migration ecologist at the University of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science in Frostburg, Maryland. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Kathleen. Happy to be here. Thanks for joining us. So walk me through

what you found in this study. Yeah, so we analyzed banding records from bird observatories across eastern North America, totaling hundreds of thousands of individually banded birds. And we analyzed that data set to test for, as you said, these non-random associations among these various migrating songbirds. So we know they all are co-occurring in high numbers at stopover sites where they stop along their migratory journeys. But we were testing whether it's not just a coincidence who appears next to who. And so we conducted these social network analyses of these big data sets and found that that is the case. It's not a coincidence. There are persistent relationships that are consistent across the various stopover sites we looked at in between spring and fall

migration. Was this a surprising finding to you? Yes and no. So I think, we were expecting that because these migrants are all migrating at the same time, like they must be interacting with each other in some way, even though there isn't a lot of literature on the topic. But I think the persistence of these relationships was really striking to me. And really the key point of evidence supporting this idea that these are communities migrating across landscapes together, not just kind of random assemblages of species migrating across landscapes together. And so what do those interactions between bird species actually look like?

Yeah, so from our data set, we actually can't tell and are excited to conduct future research to tease apart what these interactions are. What we suspect are kind of two main species interactions. The first is competition. These birds migrate 12, 20 hours nonstop, land in these unfamiliar habitats. and have to feed and refuel quickly and continue on their journey. And so likely they could be competing with each other for limited food resources at these stopover sites. And then on the flip side is they might be benefiting from each other.

So in these unfamiliar habitats, songbird species don't typically stop at the same stop year after year. So they usually are landing in a place they've never been before. The presence of these other familiar species whose diets might be similar to the theirs whose predators might be similar to theirs, could provide valuable information to help these birds locate good habitat, locate good food, avoid predators along the way. So one bird species could see, oh, there's this other bird species that I run and do all the time. This must be a spot where I can hopefully survive for the next stop. Yes, exactly. I think of it a little bit like Yelp, providing, yeah, information about a place

you've never visited before. Okay. Is it also possible that these birds are sharing maybe like distress calls or warning calls with each other? Yeah. I think that is very likely. A lot of birds have warning calls when there's a predator nearby. And if they have similar predators, that could be valuable information to you. Yeah, I would imagine even if you don't speak the same bird language, the call out for runaway is probably pretty similar. across species. So what are a couple examples of species that might be tag teaming migration? Yeah, so we found a lot of strong relationships, particularly among a variety of warbler species. One of the strongest and most persistent was between American Red Starts and magnolia warblers.

So now that there seems to be this evidence for cross species relationships, is it possible that this could impact our understanding of conservation? Yeah, I think so. So this really encourages a, I think, a more holistic approach to these animal migrations by highlighting how interconnected they all are. Many migratory birds around the globe are experiencing steep population declines. And I think this paper shows that the population declines of one particular species isn't a problem just for that species. It means that now there's a whole node missing from these migratory social networks. And whatever competitive interactions that species was engaged in are now gone or whatever valuable social information that species was providing to its other co-migrants is now gone.

Well, that is about all the time that we have for right now. Jolie, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. Dr. Jolie Desimony, a migration ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Frostburg, Maryland. Maryland. This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Charles Bergquist. If you ever happen to need a gram of antimatter, NASA estimates it'll cost you about $62.5 trillion. Making antimatter is expensive, and controlling it, holding it, manipulating it, that's even more so. So why bother? It all comes down to one of the most fundamental questions about the universe. Why is there something rather

than nothing? Why do we have stuff? Anti-matter is just like matter, except, for one thing. Antimatter particles have the same mass as ordinary matter, but an opposite charge. Each particle has its own anti-counterpart. For example, an electron has a negative charge. So an anti-electron, called a positron, weighs the same but has a positive charge. But beyond that simple definition, what exactly is antimatter? How do you make it? And why do we care? Joining me now is Dr. Jamie Dunlap. He's the Associate Department Chair for Nuclear Physics at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island. An experiment there recently created the heaviest exotic antimatter nucleus to date, something called anti-hyperhydrogen 4. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Dunlop.

It's a pleasure to talk to you. You as well. So to start, what is anti-hyperhydrogen for? That's a mouthful. Yeah, let's break it down. So there's the anti-piece, which means that it's made completely out of anti-matter. There's the hyper piece, which I'll get into in a bit. The hydrogen four means that is made out of four different nucleons. It's basically like helium. So you've got a proton, you've got two neutrons, and then you've got a heavier counterpart of the proton, which is a land, and that's the hyper part. In any case, it's the heaviest piece of antimatter that we've ever been able to make and observe in the lab. And by doing that, we're trying to understand its properties relative to its partner matter, the hyper-hydrogen for nucleus. So I could think of it as sort of like

an antihelium, but with a little bit extra. Like you've supersized the antihelium. Absolutely. Yeah, we've made its mass just slightly higher. And so that makes it actually a lot easier to detect. So your collider, Rick, is basically slamming gold ions together at incredible. incredible speeds. How do you get from that to making antimatter? Okay. That's a very good question. So anti-matter and matter are created when you convert pure energy into mass, right? E equals mZ squared found back in 1905 by Einstein. Right. So when we take these nuclei that are very high energies and we slam them together, you create a little region of matter that's maybe two trillion degrees Kelvin or Celsius is the same

thing at that temperature. And that lasts for something like 20 octo seconds, 30 octo seconds, one of my favorite units, very small piece of matter, very short amount of time at a very high temperature. And so in that, you've created thousands of particles that are all moving around and some of them find each other. Right? So you've created thousands of matter particles. And every now and then, they're going to find a partner or they're going to find two partners or they're going to find three partners and they're going to make this chunk of antimatter, these nuclei that are made out of antimatter, these chunks of antimatter. So it's not like you woke up one morning and said, I'm going to make anti-hyperhydrogen four. You said, I'm going to do this collision. And the conditions

were just right to find it in the soup of other stuff. Absolutely. And in fact, this is one piece of the physics that we do at the relativistic heavy ion collider. There's a whole other set of physics that we do is trying to understand the properties of the matter that we create at these high temperatures. But yes, so what we did is we actually searched through seven billion collisions, each of which creates a thousand particles.

So that's seven trillion particles. And we found 16 of these anti-hyperhydrogen four. So that's like, you know, if you think about orders of magnitude, that's like an expensive lunch versus the entire size of the United States federal budget. So it's looking at a very small needle in a very large haste. Very large. So you mentioned the properties of this stuff. Does it actually act just like other matter in every way except the charge and spin I mentioned?

I'm thinking of things like magnetic fields, electric charges, gravity, all those good things. Yeah, no, that's a very good question. You know, we think it does. Theoretically, it should have the same mass. It should interact with gravity the same way. Electromagnetically, it's just got opposite charge. But other than that, it interacts with electromagnetism the same way. You know, there are all different types of forces.

However, again, the nethermagnetically. mystery is why the universe that we see that is us, you know, the trees, the sky, why that's all matter. Now, at the beginning in the Big Bang, there was lots of antimatter. There was lots of matter around. And the matter found its anti-matter partners and they all annihilated. But there was just a little bit left over, which created the matter universe that we see now. One in a billion. That's about the level. Do we think that there was just a little bit, extra matter created or is the anti-matter that was created somewhere else? There's like a pool of it somewhere in deep space. Yeah, no, we don't see any evidence of it being somewhere,

a pool of it somewhere in deep space. It just wasn't created. And it's potentially that that's because it's either an accident or it's because the properties of antimatter and matter are somewhat different, right? Those are the two possibilities. And so we're looking, you know, as scientists, we don't really like thinking about accident. So we're looking to see if there are differences between the matter and the antimatter. So we've been talking about antimatter like it's some exotic thing, but things like positrons are made all the time. Even your body is emitting positrons. So why are other kinds of antimatter things so challenging to make and work with? It's just the energy scales you're looking at.

It's not that challenging. I mean, right now, a mile away from me at the collider, we're creating millions of particles of antimatter every second, right? It's just trying to find various combinations of this antimatter, various configurations of this antimatter that are riged. So how do you hold it or measure it, work with it? What kind of tools do you need beyond this massive collider just creating it? Well, okay, so we've got these particle detectors. So when you collide, it happens at a very small scale and it only lasts for a very short amount of time. And then the particles all stream out. And they come out to something that's our size, our scale. And we have these detector complexes that are about the size of a house that look at various properties of these particles that come out. Their speed, their momentum,

their energy, what their angles are, the various correlations. And these are the things that we use to trace back the properties that happened at the collision and also to understand the properties, how we identify the actual anti-matter nuclear. So have scientists seen the anti-versions of all of the different particles yet? Most, but again, when you get to the nuclei level, when you get to the nuclear level, we've only gotten up to a nuclear number four or so, right? We haven't gotten up, we haven't made anti-lead. We haven't made anti-gold.

We've seen anti of everything else. There are some questions on the neutrino in the neutrino area. area where there's some missing piece in terms of the spin of the neutrinos versus the spin of the antineutrinos. We only see one type of spin of the neutrinos and the opposite type of spin of the antineutrino. So there are some theories and some tests that we're doing in experiments that maybe the neutrino is its own antiparticles. So it's not even a reasonable question to ask whether you've seen an antineutrient. Is there an antinucleus that you would really want to create? Or is it just a neutrino is it just a neutral?

like heavier is always going to be better for you. I think heavier is always going to be better. I mean, it would be nice to get up to the lithium level because what we say is that at our colliders, we create little bangs. And so we want to make as much of an analogy to the Big Bang as we can. And the Big Bang nucleosynthesis,

the thing which tells you about the properties of the Big Bang by the nuclei that are created in the Big Bang, that basically goes up to lithium and doesn't get much higher. So if we could get to lithium, Then we could say that really we were doing a little bang nucleosynthesis, but that's probably not going to happen within the technology that we can create on Earth, probably for the next thousand years. So, I mean, what would it take to theoretically do something like that? Is it something that makes more antiparticles or something that does better at squishing them into the right neighborhood so that they can connect? Or what is it?

Yeah, something that makes more antiparticles. you would have to bring up the energy, bring up the temperature of the collisions, and also create many more per second than we can do with our current technology. It's orders of magnitude, probably three orders of magnitude or four. So about 14 years ago, we had a segment about some researchers at CERN who had trapped antimatter for the longest time to date. They said it was a time that you could measure with a watch. And Ira asked these guys, what practical use does it research have? And the guest's answer was absolutely none. Are we any closer now to having sort of practical applications of this antimatter research? Well, I don't know about the antimatter

itself, but the research has huge numbers of spinoffs, right? So the precision that we can control these beams, the accelerator technology, can be used for many other things. For example, here at Brookhaven, we use the same accelerator complex to make isotopes for medical uses, things that are used to cure cancer. We use the same accelerator complex to do studies of radiation in space. There's a NASA space radiation laboratory that looks at the effects on biological systems and electronic systems for space travel. You mentioned positrons that are in our body.

There's the PET scanning, positron emission tomography, which uses the very specific properties of matter, antimatter annihilation, to do precision scans of the human body. So there are lots of spin-offs from the technology we want to use for fundamental research that then are useful for other things to society. I mean, these spinoffs are definitely important, but is there a reason that you tell people that they should care about antimatter? Well, I mean, from a fundamental standpoint, we're here, right?

That the universe is matter, not antimatter, is a fundamental mystery. There are many places where we're investigating why that could be the case. This is just one of them. I guess being here is a good reason to care. Yeah. Dr. Dunlop, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Dr. Jamie Dunlop is the Associate Department Chair for Nuclear Physics at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York.

That's it for today's show. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including Sandy Roberts, Annie Niro, Jason Rosenberg, Rasha, Eridi. On tomorrow's episode, we'll round up this week's science news. Join us. I'm SciFrise Valeria Diaz. Thank you for listening.