China executes official for selling imperial relics

Fri, 19 Nov 2010

Beijing - China executed a local official Friday, six years after he was convicted of illegally selling hundreds of Qing Dynasty imperial relics for about 550,000 dollars, state media said.

Li Haitao and several accomplices stole the items while he was head of security for relics at the Waibaimiao, or Eight Outer Temples, in the Qing court's summer resort of Chengde in the northern province of Hebei.

Li was convicted in 2004 of stealing 259 protected items from 1993 to 2002 and selling 152 of them for a total of 554,000 dollars, state television and newspapers reported.

Li lost an appeal against his sentence, and China's Supreme People's Court approved the death penalty, the reports said without saying when the higher court gave its approval.

Three accomplices received sentences of two to seven years in prison in 2004.

Earlier reports said police suspicions were raised in 2002 by a Hong Kong auction of two Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) items labeled "Forbidden City," the common name of the former imperial palace in Beijing, now also known as the Palace Museum.

The Beijing museum had sent cultural relics to Chengde in the 1950s and 1960s, and they were not returned, the reports said.

China keeps the number of executions a state secret, but the US-based Dui Hua Foundation human rights group estimated that at least 5,000 people have been executed annually in recent years, more than in the rest of the world combined.

The government claimed to have limited the use of the death penalty in recent years but retains it for 68 offenses, including drug trafficking, serious corruption and other non-violent crimes.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/354255,official-selling-imperial-relics.html.

Sri Lankan president sworn in for second term

Fri, 19 Nov 2010

Colombo - Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa was sworn in for a second term Friday, saying his main focus was development work after the end of the civil war against ethnic Tamil rebels.

"During the last era, we worked with many nations in agreement and friendship for national security," Rajapaksa said, stressing his country's policy of non-alignment. "We now step into the development era. We extend our hand of friendship to those who assist us in this endeavour."

Rajapaksa has been accused of distancing himself from Western countries and maintaining closer links with China, India, Iran and Pakistan.

Many Western countries have demanded an independent inquiry of alleged human rights abuses during the conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which ended last year when the government defeated the separatist rebels. The government has refused to allow the investigation.

"We united this country, achieving a victory over terrorism that had global echoes," Rajapaksa said at the inauguration, which took place at the Presidential Secretariat before Chief Justice Ashoka de Silva. "Today, on November 19, I take over this country again with determination, strength and courage to raise my motherland to a position of greatness in the world."

"Our task is to ensure lasting national unity and sustainable, permanent peace in our motherland," he said.

Rajapaksa opted for early elections in January, two years before his term was due to end, and received 57.81 per cent of the votes. He then delayed being sworn in for his second term by nine months, enabling him to gain the maximum period in power.

The event was attended by local and foreign dignitaries, including Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, and Jigme Y Thinley, Bhutan's premier.

His inauguration was also marked with a series of religious and other celebrations throughout the country.

He was due to carry out a cabinet reshuffle Monday, followed by the presentation of the budget for next year.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/354266,lankan-president-sworn-term.html.

China: Between Myth and Reality

19/11/2010

By Amir Taheri

As the year 2010 drifts towards its end, the talk in Western political circle is about the fading of the United States as a superpower and the emergence of China as successor. The recent G-20 summit in Seoul, South Korea, revealed the beginnings of a new balance of power, with China's star rising at the expense of the US and the European Union.

Even before Seoul, China had flexed its muscle on a number of occasions.

At the summit in Copenhagen, it brushed aside US and EU pressure to commit itself to a new charter to deal with climate change. Later, it ignored US and EU demands to increase the value of its currency. In a more dramatic way, last month China forced Japan to throw in the towel in the row over a Chinese fishing boat that had violated Japanese waters.

Talk of China as a potential global power is not new.

Much of the 19th century was dominated by fear of China, or 'Yellow Peril' as it was called before Political Correctness consigned the sobriquet to oblivion. Once China had obtained its independence in 1911, a more positive image began to take shape. By 1949, however, that image had been buried under the red avalanche unleashed by Mao Zedong.

Almost 40 years ago, with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution dying down, Alain Peyrfitte, a French politician, wrote a bestseller entitled ' When China Wakes Up'. In it, he envisaged a China that, thanks to its position as the world's most populous nation, claims leadership.

At the time, Peyrfitte's prediction appeared far-fetched. China was one of the world's poorest countries still facing the threat of famine.

Today, the picture appears different. China remains the most populous nation at least until 2020 when India is projected to overtake it. It is also the world's fourth largest country. Until even 10 years ago, everyone in the West saw China as a great market. Today, it is everyone else that is a market for China. Leaving aside the oil exporting countries, almost every trading partner of China has a huge trade deficit with it.

How realistic is the image of China as the new world leader?

The principal argument of the 'China-as-World-Leader' school is economic. In 2009, China's GDP rose to $8.5 trillion, making it the world's third largest economy. However, when it comes to GDP per head China is numbered 131. The average Dutchman is six times richer than his Chinese counterpart.

But what about China's annual growth rate?

China's growth rate of 8 per cent is certainly impressive compared to two per cent n the European Union and, perhaps, three per cent in the US. However growth rate is often higher in developing economies. According to the World Bank, in 2009 Iraq, for example, had a growth rate of 34 per cent while Afghanistan's rate of growth was projected at 22 per cent. In the first phases of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain enjoyed average annual growth rates of 15 per cent.

In any case, economic power alone cannot propel a nation into a leadership position. For example, Japan and Germany, the fourth and fifth largest economies in the world, do not play a political role commensurate with their economic power. Candidates for global leadership must meet a number of conditions.

The first of these is to ensure the goodwill of neighbors in one's region.

On that score, China appears in a weak position. China has long-standing territorial disputes with Russia, Japan, Vietnam and India. In the 1960s the Russians occupied large tracts of Chinese territory along the Usuri River. In the same period, China attacked and occupied big chunks of Indian territory, including almost a third of Kashmir. China is also in dispute over continental shelf, water frontiers and islands with South Korea and Japan, not to mention its claim of ownership of the Taiwanese archipelago.

Russia, India and Japan are not alone in watching the rise of China with concern. Indonesia, Vietnam and The Philippines would also regard the emergence of China as a hegemonic power with little enthusiasm.

In fact, among China's immediate or near neighbors, only Pakistan could be regarded as an ally, and that because of shared hostility towards India.

The second condition that a candidate for global leadership must meet is internal peace. Here, too, China's position is less than secure.

Tibet may never be able to break away. But it could continue to blacken the country's image while raising the cost of its absorption into the Chinese sphere.

Even more complicated is the situation in East Turkestan or Xingjian as the Chinese prefer to call it, where the Muslim Uighur nation resists forcible sinification.

More importantly, the current system of one-party politics plus capitalist economy might not be sustainable for long.

Zhao Ziyang, the reformist leader of the Chinese Communist Party who was pushed aside after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, had recognized that contradiction as early as 1987. In his journals, smuggled out of China and published in the West, he warns that without democratization the country could head for instability and even disintegration.

China's ' economic miracle' has created a new middle class of around 200 million people and brought more than 400 million others out of poverty along the country's seaboard. However, that leaves almost half a billion people still in poverty with at least 250 million in precarious employment. Export-driven, China's economy remains vulnerable without a strong domestic market.

Thirdly, a candidate for global leadership needs an attractive cultural profile.

Here, too, China s found wanting. The world's third largest economy is not yet producing writers, composers, painters, filmmakers and designers that could attract a following in the outside world. In the same register, China does not feature among the world's leading scientific innovating powers. In 2009, less than three per cent of scientific and technological patents were registered by China.

To play a global leadership role, a great power also needs a wealth of knowledge and experience about the world. Here, too, China is far behind. Apart from English which has become popular with China's new middle classes, few Chinese learn foreign languages. Nor has China developed the research institutions dedicated to the study of other cultures and societies.

Over the past 20 years, China has become the world's factory, manufacturing cheap consumer goods for sale in Western markets. In other words, low-paid Chinese workers have been subsidizing wealthy Western consumers, in part thanks to a national currency that is kept below its real value.

Although a great power that must play a role in shaping the global agenda, China still lacks the wherewithal for assuming world leadership. It would be both unfair and potentially dangerous to propel it into a position for which it is not ready. The greatest service that China's leaders are offering the rest of the world is keeping their country, a quarter of mankind, relatively stable and peaceful.

Whether one likes it or not, the US must continue to bear the burden of world leadership. Right now, partly thanks to its clueless president, the US appears to be in decline as it did under Jimmy Carer in the 1970s. Nevertheless, news of its demise as a world power may prove to be widely exaggerated.

Source: Asharq Al-Awsat
Link: http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=2&id=23080.

Indonesia's Forests Loom As Green Gold

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Nov 16, 2010 (IPS) - All eyes are on Indonesia and its forest policy as climate- change negotiations continue in the upcoming global talks in Mexico, against the prospect of billions of dollars flowing from the planet’s major polluters to the developing world to slow global warming.

The forests in South-east Asia’s largest country will be among those coming under scrutiny during Nov. 29 to Dec. 10, 2010 climate change meetings in the Mexican resort city of Cancun, environmentalists say. These meetings are the 16th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 6th conference of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol.

The potential windfall of incoming funds for countries in the Global South stems from discussions between climate change negotiators under a scheme known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestations and Forest Degradation (REDD), which opens the door for market-friendly financial mechanisms to be used to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

International efforts to make Indonesia REDD-ready in the region arise from the archipelago’s being home to the largest biodiversity-rich rainforest in South-east Asia.

Indonesia accounts for 94 million hectares of the South- east Asia’s 214 million hectares spread across 10 countries, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Burma, or Myanmar, comes a distant second, with 32 million hectares of forest cover.

"This is why there is so much attention on Indonesia with the ongoing discussions regards REDD," said Patrick Durst, FAO’s senior forestry officer for Asia and the Pacific. "REDD could potentially be a useful tool and incentive for countries to stop deforestation."

Even before the prospect of new revenue streams from REDD heading to Indonesia, Jakarta had been pursuing measures to curb logging in its forests. Already, its rate of forest loss has dropped from 1.7 percent in the 1990s to 0.7 percent over the last five years, reveals Durst. "Indonesia has taken a serious approach to rein in forest clearance."

Indonesia’s significance in this climate change mitigation effort is also rooted in its being the country emitting the most amount of greenhouse gases in the world, largely due to deforestation and the clearing of forest land for plantation agriculture, including to harvest palm oil.

In a sign that he wants the country to do more, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono made a commitment at the September 2009 meeting of the world’s G-20 largest economies to slash his country’s greenhouse emissions by putting the brakes on deforestation and degradation, which are among the major contributors to global warming.

The new benchmarks the Indonesia leader set were a "commitment to reduce emissions from land use, land use change and forestry by 26 percent in 2020 from the business- as-usual levels, and by 41 percent with international assistance," stated the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), an environmental think tank based in Bogor, Indonesia.

"Analysis shows that reducing Indonesia’s deforestation rate by five percent could generate REDD payments of 765 million U.S. dollars a year, while a 30 percent reduction could generate over 4.5 billion U.S. dollars a year," noted CIFOR. "Through REDD, Indonesia has a unique opportunity to generate revenue, reduce the loss of forest cover and, in doing so, to make a significant contribution to mitigating global climate change."

But this path to potential prosperity is also paved with hurdles, the most daunting among them being corruption in the forestry sector.

"There is serious corruption in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea," said Manoj Nadkarni, head of the forest governance integrity program in the Asia-Pacific region for Transparency International (TI), the Berlin-based global anti-corruption watchdog. "Indonesia ranks among the world’s worst five countries in Transparency’s Corruption Perception Index."

"Corruption threatens to undermine REDD," he told IPS on the sidelines of the 14th International Anti-Corruption Conference that ended over the weekend in Bangkok. "The problem is with illegal logging. Corruption in Indonesia’s forestry sector is the major driver of illegal logging."

Illegal logging worldwide "robs the public of around 10 billion U.S. dollars a year from state-owned forests," Transparency International said in its ‘Analyzing Corruption in the Forestry Sector’ report released at the just-ended conference. "Underpayment of taxes by legal concession holders amounts to an additional five billion U.S. dollars."

The ongoing illegal logging to feed the voracious demand for timbre for furniture and flooring across the world puts the estimated 700 million hectares of forest lands in the Asia-Pacific region in peril.

Some reports estimate that the current pace of illegal logging in countries targeted by timber companies – ranging from Burma, Cambodia and Laos to Vietnam, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea – could precipitate a dramatic drop in forest cover totaling a loss of 6.6 million hectares by 2020.

Strengthening governance at the local level is key for REDD to succeed, says Bernd-Markus Liss, an adviser on climate-relevant forest policy for the German Technical Cooperation in the Philippines. "Corruption in the forestry sector is prominent at the local level."

"There is a need to create more transparency in licensing, auditing and investment," he said in an interview. "Well-meaning measures, with adequate checks and balances, could also trigger corruption if local realities are not factored in."

Source: IPS News.
Link: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53568.

Seasonal Bans Not Enough to Save Pacific Tuna

By Edgardo Ayala

SAN SALVADOR, Nov 16, 2010 (Tierramérica) - The countries that fish for tuna in the Eastern Pacific Ocean see seasonal bans as a form of responsible fishing, but environmentalists argue that they are not enough to ensure the survival of a resource that is threatened around the world.

The Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC, based in California), whose member countries fish for tuna in the tropical Pacific, on Oct. 1 adopted new seasonal bans for 2011, 2012 and 2013 for the three most prized tuna species in the zone: the yellowfin (Thunnus albacares), bigeye (Thunnus obesus) and skipjack (Katsuwonus pelamis).

"What we are doing is preserving for the future; these are necessary conservation measures," Miguel Peñalva, director of operations for the Spain- based Calvo Group in El Salvador, told Tierramérica.

The Calvo Group started its tuna operations in El Salvador in September 2003 with an investment of 138 million dollars. Although this Central American country does not have a tuna industry as such, in virtue of Calvo's presence, it has become the region's principle exporter of canned tuna.

Four of the Calvo Group's boats fish in international waters of the Pacific off the Salvadoran coast, and more than 80 percent of its exports, which totaled 100 million dollars in 2008, are destined for the European Union.

"If we don't comply with the seasonal bans, they would declare our fishing illegal and we wouldn't be able to sell it," said Peñalva.

The IATTC bans, based on studies by its scientific committee on the state of the Pacific's fisheries, halt fishing 62 days per year and are required for all members: Belize, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, EU, France, Guatemala, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Taiwan, South Korea, United States, Vanuatu and Venezuela.

Independent observers report to the IATTC about the countries' compliance with the bans, and the fishing fleets are monitored using satellites to determine their positions.

"The bans take place during the tuna's growth period," said Peñalva, underscoring the importance of heeding the seasonal fishing stoppages.

But according to Sari Tolvanen, of Greenpeace International's oceans campaign, "the bans don't necessarily mean a reduction in fishing."

First of all, the periods are too short to make much of a difference, Tolvanen told Tierramérica from Amsterdam. The fleets that use purse-seine techniques fish 75 percent of the year, and cease operations when they have to undergo mechanical updates anyway, she said.

The purse-seine is one of the least eco-friendly fishing techniques because it allows huge captures in which there is a great deal of bycatch -- fish that are too small or species that are not marketable.

In addition, the purse-seine vessels are quite large and increasingly use artificial floating objects to catch more fish, such that the seasonal bans make little sense, said Tolvanen.

When fishing for skipjack, those floating devices increase the bycatch of yellowfin and bigeye tuna that are still too small to be sold, further endangering these and other species, like sharks and sea turtles.

"Calvo and other companies rely heavily on the objects," which makes their operations "completely unsustainable," said the Greenpeace activist.

In its resolution, IATTC recognized that tuna fishing in the Eastern Pacific is increasing and that populations could begin to decline if the catch is excessive.

In other parts of the world, tuna populations have fallen to critical levels.

Bigeye and yellowfin tuna have been over-fished in all seas and face serious problems in the central and western Pacific, where their populations were relatively robust just a few years ago, according to Greenpeace.

The bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), native to the Atlantic and adjacent seas, is one step away from extinction, and the bluefin of the Mediterranean has seen its population drop 80 percent since 1999.

The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) maintains a tuna stocks status chart on its website, using color coding for each of the world's seas and their tuna species -- with red indicating the most critical stocks.

On the ISSF chart, the yellowfin and bigeye species are marked in yellow for the Eastern Pacific, because those populations cannot support any increase in catches, and in some cases suffer from overfishing. Only the skipjack is marked in green, indicating a healthy population.

In 2009, approximately 595,000 tonnes of tuna were caught in that region, 14 percent of the world tuna catch, according to the report updated in September, titled "ISSF Status of the World Fisheries for Tuna."

Spain, with the largest fishing fleet of the EU and third in the world after China and Peru, catches most of its tuna in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and off the coast of Western Africa, but according to Greenpeace, the "Spanish fishing armada" sails the world's oceans pursuing more substantial catches of tuna, shark and codfish.

That would explain the presence of the Calvo Group in El Salvador.

For the 2009-2011 period, IATTC established specific quotas for some of the big fishers in the Pacific: China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

In Tolvanen's view, the IATTC and other regional tuna commissions are a long way from achieving adequate management of the tuna species.

The Greenpeace expert stressed that it is just a handful of fishing nations that are negotiating the "tuna pie" and how to make more money, without considering the long-term health of the tuna stocks, the oceans, the means for people to make a living and their food security.

(*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialized news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Program, United Nations Environment Program and the World Bank.) (END)

Source: IPS News.
Link: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53573.

Airports consider congressman's call to ditch TSA

By RAY HENRY and MIKE SCHNEIDER, Associated Press

ATLANTA – In a climate of Internet campaigns to shun airport pat-downs and veteran pilots suing over their treatment by government screeners, some airports are considering another way to show dissatisfaction: Ditching TSA agents altogether.

Federal law allows airports to opt for screeners from the private sector instead. The push is being led by a powerful Florida congressman who's a longtime critic of the Transportation Security Administration and counts among his campaign contributors some of the companies who might take the TSA's place.

Furor over airline passenger checks has grown as more airports have installed scanners that produce digital images of the body's contours, and the anger intensified when TSA added a more intrusive style of pat-down recently for those who opt out of the full-body scans. Some travelers are using the Internet to organize protests aimed at the busy travel days next week surrounding Thanksgiving.

For Republican Rep. John Mica of Florida, the way to make travelers feel more comfortable would be to kick TSA employees out of their posts at the ends of the snaking security lines. This month, he wrote letters to nation's 100 busiest airports asking that they request private security guards instead.

"I think we could use half the personnel and streamline the system," Mica said Wednesday, calling the TSA a bloated bureaucracy.

Mica is the ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Once the new Congress convenes in January, the lawmaker is expected lead the committee.

Companies that could gain business if airports heed Mica's call have helped fill his campaign coffers. In the past 13 years, Mica has received almost $81,000 in campaign donations from political action committees and executives connected to some of the private contractors already at 16 U.S. airports.

Private contractors are not a cure-all for passengers aggrieved about taking off their shoes for security checks, passing through full-body scanners or getting hand-frisked. For example, contractors must follow all TSA-mandated security procedures, including hand patdowns when necessary.

Still, the top executive at the Orlando-area's second-largest airport, Orlando Sanford International Airport, said he plans to begin the process of switching to private screeners in January as long as a few remaining concerns can be met. The airport is within Mica's district, and the congressman wrote his letter after hearing about its experiences.

CEO Larry Dale said members of the board that runs Sanford were impressed after watching private screeners at airports in Rochester, N.Y., and Jackson Hole, Wyo. He said TSA agents could do better at customer service.

"Some of them are a little testy," said Dale, whose airport handles 2 million passengers a year. "And we work hard to get passengers and airlines. And to have it undone by a personality problem?"

To the south, the city's main airport, Orlando International, said it's reviewing Mica's proposal, although it has some questions about how the system would work with the 34 million passengers it handles each year. In Georgia, Macon City Councilor Erick Erickson, whose committee oversees the city's small airport, wants private screeners there.

Erickson called it a protest move in an interview.

"I am a frequent air traveler and I have experienced ... TSA agents who have let the power go to their head," Erickson said. "You can complain about those people, but very rarely does the bureaucracy work quickly enough to remove those people from their positions."

TSA officials would select and pay the contractors who run airport security. But Dale thinks a private contractor would be more responsive since the contractor would need local support to continue its business with the airport.

"Competition drives accountability, it drives efficiency, it drives a particular approach to your airport," Dale said. "That company is just going to be looking at you. They're not going to be driven out of Washington, they will be driven out of here."

San Francisco International Airport has used private screeners since the formation of the TSA and remains the largest to do so.

The airport believed a private contractor would have more flexibility to supplement staff during busy periods with part-time employees, airport spokesman Mike McCarron said. Also, the city's high cost of living had made it difficult in the past to recruit federal employees to run immigration and customs stations — a problem the airport didn't want at security checkpoints.

"You get longer lines," McCarron said.

TSA spokesman Greg Soule would not respond directly Mica's letter, but reiterated the nation's roughly 460 commercial airports have the option of applying to use private contractors.

Companies that provide airport security are contributors to Mica's campaigns, although some donations came before those companies won government contracts. The Lockheed Martin Corp. Employees' Political Action Committee has given $36,500 to Mica since 1997. A Lockheed firm won the security contract in Sioux Falls, S.D. in 2005 and the contract for San Francisco the following year.

Raytheon Company's PAC has given Mica $33,500 since 1999. A Raytheon subsidiary began providing checkpoint screenings at Key West International Airport in 2007.

FirstLine Transportation Security Inc.'s PAC has donated $4,500 to the Florida congressman since 2004. FirstLine has been screening baggage and has been responsible for passenger checkpoints at the Kansas City International Airport since 2006, as well as the Gallup Municipal Airport and the Roswell Industrial Air Center in New Mexico, operating at both since 2007.

Since 2006, Mica has received $2,000 from FirstLine President Keith Wolken and $1,700 from Gerald Berry, president of Covenant Aviation Security. Covenant works with Lockheed to provide security at airports in Sioux Falls and San Francisco.

Mica spokesman Justin Harclerode said the contributions never improperly influenced the congressman, who said he was unaware Raytheon or Lockheed were in the screening business.

"They certainly never contacted him about providing screening," Harclerode said.

Anger over the screenings hasn't just come from passengers. Two veteran commercial airline pilots asked a federal judge this week to stop the whole-body scans and the new pat-down procedures, saying it violates their civil rights.

The pilots, Michael S. Roberts of Memphis and Ann Poe of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., have refused to participate in either screening method and, as a result, will not fly out of airports that use these methods, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Washington.

Roberts is a pilot with ExpressJet Airlines and is on unpaid administrative leave because of his refusal to enter the whole-body scanners. Poe flies for Continental Airlines and will continue to take off work as long as the existing regulations are in place.

"In her eyes, the pat-down is a physical molestation and the WBI scanner is not only intrusive, degrading and potentially dangerous, but poses a real and substantial threat to medical privacy," the lawsuit states.

___

Schneider reported from Orlando. Associated Press Writer Adrian Sainz in Memphis and AP Business Writer Samantha Bomkamp in New York contributed to this report.

Antihydrogen Trapped For First Time

by Staff Writers
Berkeley CA (SPX) Nov 18, 2010

Physicists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, have succeeded in trapping antihydrogen - the antimatter equivalent of the hydrogen atom - a milestone that could soon lead to experiments on a form of matter that disappeared mysteriously shortly after the birth of the universe 14 billion years ago.

The first artificially produced low energy antihydrogen atoms - consisting of a positron, or antimatter electron, orbiting an antiproton nucleus - were created at CERN in 2002, but until now the atoms have struck normal matter and annihilated in a flash of gamma-rays within microseconds of creation.

The ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus) experiment, an international collaboration that includes physicists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), has now trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms, each for more than one-tenth of a second.

While the number and lifetime are insufficient to threaten the Vatican - in the 2000 novel and 2009 movie "Angels and Demons," a hidden vat of potentially explosive antihydrogen was buried under St. Peter's Basilica in Rome - it is a starting point for learning new physics, the researchers said.

"We are getting close to the point at which we can do some classes of experiments on the properties of antihydrogen," said Joel Fajans, UC Berkeley professor of physics, LBNL faculty scientist and ALPHA team member. "Initially, these will be crude experiments to test CPT symmetry, but since no one has been able to make these types of measurements on antimatter atoms at all, it's a good start."

CPT (charge-parity-time) symmetry is the hypothesis that physical interactions look the same if you flip the charge of all particles, change their parity - that is, invert their coordinates in space - and reverse time.

Any differences between antihydrogen and hydrogen, such as differences in their atomic spectrum, automatically violate CPT, overthrow today's "standard model" of particles and their interactions, and may explain why antimatter, created in equal amounts during the universe's birth, is largely absent today.

The team's results will be published online Nov. 17 in advance of its print appearance in the British journal Nature.

Antimatter, first predicted by physicist Paul Dirac in 1931, has the opposite charge of normal matter and annihilates completely in a flash of energy upon interaction with normal matter. While astronomers see no evidence of significant antimatter annihilation in space, antimatter is produced during high-energy particle interactions on earth and in some decays of radioactive elements. UC Berkeley physicists Emilio Segre and Owen Chamberlain created antiprotons in the Bevatron accelerator at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, now LBNL, in 1955, confirming their existence and earning the scientists the 1959 Nobel Prize in physics.

Slow antihydrogen was produced at CERN in 2002 thanks to an antiproton decelerator that slowed antiprotons enough for them to be used in experiments that combined them with a cloud of positrons. The ATHENA experiment, a broad international collaboration, reported the first detection of cold antihydrogen, with the rival ATRAP experiment close behind.

The ATHENA experiment closed down in 2004, to be superseded by ALPHA, coordinated by Jeffrey Hangst of the University of Aarhus in Denmark. Since then, the ALPHA and ATRAP teams have competed to trap antihydrogen for experiments, in particular, laser experiments to measure the antihydrogen spectrum (the color with which it glows) - and gravity measurements. Before the recent results, the CERN experiments have produced - only fleetingly - tens of millions of antihydrogen atoms, Fajans said.

ALPHA's approach was to cool antiprotons and compress them into a matchstick-size cloud (20 millimeters long and 1.4 millimeters in diameter). Then, using autoresonance, a technique developed by UC Berkeley visiting professor Lazar Friedland and first explored in plasmas by Fajans and former U.C Berkeley graduate student Erik Gilson, the cloud of cold, compressed antiprotons is nudged to overlap a like-size positron cloud, where the two particles mate to form antihydrogen.

All this happens inside a magnetic bottle that traps the antihydrogen atoms. The magnetic trap is a specially configured magnetic field that Fajans and then-UC Berkeley undergraduate Andrea Schmidt first proposed, using an unusual and expensive octupole superconducting magnet to create a more stable plasma.

"For the moment, we keep antihydrogen atoms around for at least 172 milliseconds - about a sixth of a second - long enough to make sure we have trapped them," said colleague Jonathan Wurtele, UC Berkeley professor of physics and LBNL faculty scientist. Wurtele collaborated with LBNL visitor Katia Gomberoff, staff members Alex Friedman, David Grote and Jean-Luc Vay and with Fajans to simulate the new and original magnetic configurations.

Trapping antihydrogen isn't easy, Fajans said, because it is a neutral, or chargeless, particle. Magnetic bottles are generally used to trap charged particles, such as ionized atoms. These charged particles spiral along magnetic field lines until they encounter an electric field that bounces them back towards the center of the bottle.

Neutral antihydrogen, however, would normally be unaffected by these fields. But the team takes advantage of the tiny magnetic moment of the antihydrogen atom to trap it using a steeply increasing field - a so-called magnetic mirror - that reflects them backward toward the center.

Because the magnetic moment is so small, the antihydrogen has to be very cold: less than about one-half degree above absolute zero (0.5 Kelvin). That means the team had to slow down the antiprotons by a factor of one hundred billion from their initial energy emerging from the antiproton decelerator.

Once trapped, the experimenters sweep out the lingering antiprotons with an electric field, then shut off the mirror fields and let the trapped antihydrogen atoms annihilate with normal matter. Surrounding detectors are sensitive to the charged pions that result from the proton-antiproton annihilation. Cosmic rays can also set off the detector, but their straight-line tracks can be easily distinguished, Fajans said.

A few antiprotons could potentially remain in the trap, and their annihilations would look similar to those of antihydrogen, but the physicists' simulations show that such events can also be successfully distinguished from antihydrogen annihilations.

During August and September of 2010, the team detected an antihydrogen atom in 38 of the 335 cycles of antiproton injection. Given that their detector efficiency is about 50 percent, the team calculated that it captured approximately 80 of the several million antihydrogen atoms produced during these cycles. Experiments in 2009 turned up six candidate antihydrogen atoms, but they have not been confirmed.

ALPHA continues to detect antihydrogen atoms at an increasing rate as the experimenters learn how to better tune their experiment, Fajans said.

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Antihydrogen_Trapped_For_First_Time_999.html.