NANJING, March 27 (Xinhua) -- As Dan Brown's new sci-fi thriller Angels and Demons, which deals with subject of antimatter, tops China's best seller lists, a project to search for the existence of the mysterious substance among primary cosmic rays has been officially launched in China.

    In Southeast University in Nanjing, capital of eastern Jiangsu Province, the Thursday formal operation of China's sole laboratory with an AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) detector, called AMS-C, marked a significant move forward in China's search for antimatter.

    "During the trial period, the AMS lab has detected signs of energetic particles from outer space which can help our understanding of the mysteries of astrophysics," said Nobel Laureate physicist Samuel Chao Chang Ting, who leads the international AMS experiment.

    Designed by Ting's research team, the AMS is a three-ton detector which searches for the existence of antimatter nuclei. The search has to be done in a space where there is much less "background noise" from other particles, since antimatter, if it exists, will be extremely difficult to detect reliably.

    In June 1998, a prototype payload of the detector, AMS-01, flew in the space shuttle Discovery and traveled in the space for 10 days. It has detected many unidentified cosmic rays near the earth's orbit. The China lab will both develop outer space exploration technologies and detect new outer-space particles on the earth's surface.

    "The first batch of data collected by the Chinese lab has been sent to our overseas AMS partner research institutions and has proven effective and reliable," said Gu Guanqun, president of the Southeast University and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

    According to experimental plans, the second generation of the detector, AMS-02, will bounce into the universe and spend three to five years in the International Space Station beginning from 2008.

    Gu, who is also director of the China lab, noted that, as part of Ting's research program, the lab will also provide technological support, diagnose errors in the system and set up a data processing network for the upcoming AMS-02 experiment.

    "The lab will play a leading global role in developing key space technologies, forecasting the outer space environment, and will contribute significantly to the whole AMS project," Ting said.

    The AMS project now has over 50 partner research institutions across 16 countries, including the United States, Russia, France, Switzerland and China.

    Southeast University, with its stronghold on electronic information technologies and wireless communications, became a full member of the AMS-02 project in May, 2002, making it only the second Chinese institution to take part in the international antimatter-searching project, coupled with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Enditem