Sci-fi 'Demons' are in the details of anti-matter

— -- An anti-matter bomb powers the plot of Angels & Demons, but scientists say that's the only place you'll see such a weapon.

"We're working on understanding the mysteries of the universe here. We're not interested in weapons," says anti-matter expert Rolf Landua of CERN, the European physics lab on the Swiss-French border.

Landua was the physics adviser for the Ron Howard-directed movie based on the 2000 book by Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown. And CERN is the lab in which scientists actually are producing minute amounts of anti-matter.

Even if those scientists crossed over to the dark side and decided to make a bomb, "it would take billions of years to accumulate enough anti-matter for an explosion," says Landua, who led a 10-year experiment that trapped a billionth of a gram's worth of antimatter hydrogen atoms.

"We're taking a leap," Howard concedes.

In the new movie, an explosive gram of anti-matter made at a lab becomes the object of contention between Harvard "symbologist" Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks), the Vatican and secret-society bad guys bent on blowing things sky-high.

What exactly is anti-matter?

Anti-matter particles are mirror images of the everyday matter particles found inside atoms; for the proton, an anti-proton exists, and for the electron, an anti-electron. Theoretically, equal amounts of anti-matter should have been made in the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago. Matter and anti-matter annihilate each other, so why matter — the stuff of stars, planets and people — dominates the universe is one of the mysteries of cosmology.

In real life, anti-matter is found only in lab experiments and when cosmic rays smack into the atmosphere, spitting out brief-lived physics exotica every once in a rare while. At CERN, high-energy beams of proton particles are fired into metal blocks to produce an anti-matter particle in about one of every million collisions. Elaborate magnetic trapping schemes capture these rarities in a vacuum to prevent their contact with real matter.