The process should be able to cool antihydrogen atoms to temperatures 25 times chillier than ever before.
Last year ALPHA used a magnetic trap to hold on to antihydrogen atoms for a record 16 minutes.
The antihydrogen was then free to wander towards the walls, and thus annihilation.
ECONOMIST: Antihydrogen atoms are captured for the first time
In addition to making antihydrogen easier to study, the new cooling technique could make it last longer in traps.
"Whatever the processes are, having slower moving, and more deeply trapped, antihydrogen should decrease the loss rate, " Robicheaux said.
The team has now gone back to their existing data on 434 antihydrogen atoms, with the antigravity question in mind.
To test whether any antihydrogen was actually formed and captured in their trap, the ALPHA team turned off its trapping magnet.
ECONOMIST: Antihydrogen atoms are captured for the first time
"By reducing the antihydrogen energy, it should be possible to perform more precise measurements of all of its parameters, " Robicheaux said.
The detectors duly observed 38 bursts of energy which the team concluded came from antihydrogen atoms hitting the wall of the trap.
ECONOMIST: Antihydrogen atoms are captured for the first time
In that time some of the particles get together and form antihydrogen.
ECONOMIST: Antihydrogen atoms are captured for the first time
Antihydrogen atoms were produced in the past by several experiments at CERN.
"In the course of all the experiments, we release (the antihydrogen atoms) and look for their annihilation, " said Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for the experiment.
Since then several teams have been trying to make colder antihydrogen and to hold on to it using clever configurations of electrical and magnetic fields.
ECONOMIST: Antihydrogen atoms are captured for the first time
The new technique relies on using precision laser beams to "kick" antihydrogen atoms, knocking loose a bit of energy from them and cooling them down.
But now scientists at CERN have successfully contained antiatoms of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds a little over 16 and a half minutes.
By shining laser light onto hydrogen or antihydrogen and observing which wavelengths are absorbed, the energy levels of the two can be compared in detail.
For decades, physicists at CERN and elsewhere have been trying to overcome these limitations with antihydrogen, which consists of a single positron orbiting a single antiproton.
The magnetic traps employed to hold the antihydrogen are only strong enough to confine it if it is colder than around half a degree above absolute zero.
The Alpha experiment's main task is to study the energy levels within antihydrogen, to spot any differences between it and the hydrogen that physicists know to extraordinary precision.
The group at CERN, called the ALPHA collaboration, was looking at antihydrogen atoms in which a positively charged antielectron, also known as a positron, orbits a negatively charged antiproton.
The team proved that among their 10 million antiprotons and 700 million positrons, 38 stable atoms of antihydrogen were formed, lasting about two tenths of a second each.
While trapping of charged normal atoms can be done with electric or magnetic fields, trapping antihydrogen atoms in this "hands-off" way requires a very particular type of field.
But handling the "antihydrogen" - bound atoms made up of an antiproton and a positron - is trickier still because it must not come into contact with anything else.
Such sculpted magnetic fields that make up the magnetic bottle are not particularly strong, so the trick was to make antihydrogen atoms that didn't have much energy - that is, they were slow-moving.
The electrically neutral antihydrogen atoms are left behind.
ECONOMIST: Antihydrogen atoms are captured for the first time
"Atoms are neutral - they have no net charge - but they have a little magnetic character, " explained Jeff Hangst of Aarhus University in Denmark, one of the collaborators on the Alpha antihydrogen trapping project.
The team has made a statistical study of which antihydrogen atoms went where - up or down - and they are able to put a first set of constraints on how the anti-atoms respond to gravity.
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