CERN team uses GPUs to discover if antimatter falls up, not down
In the next year or two, researchers at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) should be able to answer one of the most fundamental questions bedeviling physicists: what is the effect of gravity on antimatter?
As we all learned back in high school, matter falls to Earth at an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared, and according to the weak equivalence principle (WEP), that acceleration is the same for all bodies independent of their size, mass, or composition – in a vacuum, of course.
But is the same true for antimatter? Or does it fall faster, slower – or, possibly, does it "fall" upwards, away from the gravitational force? No one knows – but an international group of European researchers, the AEgIS Collaboration – Antimatter Experiment: gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy – aims to find out with the help of the parallel-processing powers of GPUs.
