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The ALPHA collaboration at CERN in Geneva has scored another coup on the antimatter front by performing the first-ever spectroscopic measurements of the internal state of the antihydrogen atom. Their results are reported in a forthcoming issue of Nature and are now online.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The physics community got a jolt last year when results showed for the first time that neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, might be the odd man out in the particle world and have different masses. This idea was something that went against most commonly accepted theories of how the subatomic world works.

A group of physicists working with data from a particle detector at the Tevatron collider announced last month that they had found something they could not explain. High-speed smash-ups between protons and their antimatter counterparts, observed by the Illinois site's CDF detector, appeared to yield a certain kind of package in unexpected abundance : a massive particle known as the W boson along with two jets of other particles. The CDF excess hinted at the existence of some unknown particle, an unidentified and possibly disruptive addition to the family of particles described by the long-reigning, exceptionally well-tested Standard Model of particle physics

Physicists at Rice University and their collaborators have detected the antimatter partner of the helium nucleus, antihelium-4. This newly observed particle is the heaviest antimatter particle ever detected.

Members of the international STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider -- a particle accelerator used to recreate and study conditions of the early universe at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory -- have detected the antimatter partner of the helium nucleus: antihelium-4.