Scientists successfully transported 92 antiprotons in a truck around CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory, using specialized bottles which prevent contact with matter.Credit: CERN
Antimatter is matter’s equal and opposite. If the two meet they annihilate each other, turning entirely into energy, which makes it incredible difficult to store or move antimatter.
On 24 March, a team at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, transported 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields. The bottle travelled on the back of a truck, for a 30-minute journey around the lab’s site outside Geneva, Switzerland.
The experiment’s ultimate goal is to take the antiparticles to a location free from experimental noise, where antiprotons can be studied in greater precision than is possible in the CERN “antimatter factory” where they are created.
CERN is the only place in the world that produces antiprotons in usable quantities. Many staff turned out with their phone cameras to capture the truck as it travelled more than 8 kilometres around the site, reaching a maximum speed of 42 km per hour.
“It is something humanity has never done before, it is historic,” says Stefan Ulmer, a physicist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), in Germany, and member of the team. “We bought a lot of champagne, and we invited the entire antimatter community to celebrate with us today.”
Antimatter can be used to study other phenomena such as the structure of radioactive nuclei, or researched itself to unravel some of the Universe’s deepest mysteries. Physicists who created the antimatter factory more than thirty years ago dreamed that someday it might be possible to transport it, says Christian Smorra, a physicist at HHU who led the project. “Now it’s finally possible.”
“This is a great technological achievement,” says Tara Shears, a physicist at the University of Liverpool, UK. Antimatter is the most fragile type of matter there is, and so storing it, let alone driving it around CERN, is “a technological marvel”, she says.
“I love the idea of CERN becoming the Deliveroo of antimatter,” she adds.
Antimatter deliveroo
Anti-particles are like their matter counterparts, except with their charge and magnetic properties reversed. Although matter is abundant, antimatter occurs naturally only very rarely. No one knows why this disparity exists, when both should have been created in equal amounts during the Big Bang.
CERN makes antimatter by colliding beams of protons into a dense metal, then capturing and slowing the antiprotons that emerge using electric and magnetic fields. The process is painstaking, and most particles are lost in the process.
Simulation of matter–antimatter creation on quantum platforms
Developing a portable trap for the particles where the particles never touch the matter-containing sides – meant powering a superconducting magnet system and using cryogenics to cool it to a chilly 4 kelvin (−269 °C). The bottle had to be kept in a very strict vacuum to stop antimatter meeting any stray matter particles and annihilating on the way, and all the kit had to withstand the forces of the journey in a truck. The team installed a detector, which meant they could check on the antiprotons from the driving seat.
