Physicists Create First-Ever Antimatter Qubit, Making the Quantum World Even Weirder
Physicists Create First-Ever Antimatter Qubit, Making the Quantum World Even Weirder

Physicists Create First-Ever Antimatter Qubit, Making the Quantum World Even Weirder

The antimatter trap has a allu foil hat.
I love shit like that.
We have this incredibly expensive machine that was made by incredible engineers and scientists who spent an ungodly amount of hours on it. And their solution to some kind of problem with the machine, was to wrap a part in kitchengrade alu-foil, probably from the employee kitchen.
Aluminum foil is very common in physics labs. And a main use for it is "baking"! To get ultra high vacuum (UHV)* you generally need to "bake out" your chamber while you pump down. Foil is used same as with baking food --- keep the heat in and evenly distributed on the chamber.
Sadly, it's usually not food grade aluminum foil, as that can contain oils, and oils and vacuum are generally a big no-no.
*Just how good is UHV? Roughly: I live in San Francisco, which is
7 miles by ~7 miles (11km). Imagine you raise that by another 7 miles to make a cube. Now, evacuate every last molecule of gas out of it. Now take a family sedan's trunk, fill it with 1 atmosphere of gas, and release that into the 7 mile cube. That's roughly UHV pressure.The Voyager spacecrafts had some of their wires wrapped in, cleaned, store bought aluminum foil after a last minute change in the expected environment around Jupiter.