“‘What we’d like to do is see if there’s some difference that we don’t understand yet between matter and antimatter,” Professor Hangst said. ‘That difference may be more fundamental; that may have to do with very high-energy things that happened at the beginning of the universe. That’s why holding on to them is so important – we need time to study them.‘”
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern have found a way to hold atoms of antimatter for a fraction of a second. “[T]he ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics….'[W]e need a lot more atoms and a lot longer times before it’s really useful – but one has to crawl before you sprint.’”