CERN
Antimatter in motion in a CERN truck
Physicists have managed, for the first time, to transport the most expensive and most volatile substance on Earth: antimatter. 92 antiprotons traveled in a special bottle in the back of a truck on a 30-minute journey around the laboratory grounds.
Antimatter is, as you might guess, the equivalent opposite of matter. If the two meet, annihilate each othertransforming entirely into energy. This makes it extremely difficult to store or move antimatter.
On Tuesday, a team from CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, transported 92 antiprotons in a bottle specially designed that traps particles through magnetic fields.
The bottle traveled in the back of a truckon a 30-minute journey around the laboratory grounds, says .
The ultimate goal of the experiment is to take the antiparticles to a location free from experimental noise, where the antiprotons can be studied with greater precision than is possible in the field. CERN’s “antimatter factory”where they are created.
CERN is the only location in the world which produces usable amounts of antiprotons. Many employees went out with cell phone cameras to capture the truck as it traveled more than 8 kilometers across the site, reaching a top speed of 42 kilometers per hour.
“AND something humanity has never done beforeit’s historic,” he says. Stefan Ulmerteam member and physicist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), Germany. “We bought a lot of champagne and 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 be investigated itself to unravel some of the deepest mysteries of the Universe.
The physicists who created the antimatter factory more than 30 years ago dreamed that one day it would be possible to transport the material, says Christian Smorraa physicist at HHU who led the project. “Now it’s finally possible“.
“This is a great technological achievement,” he says Tara Shearsphysics at the University of Liverpool, UK. “Antimatter is the most fragile type of matter that exists, so storing it, let alone driving it through CERN, is a technological marvel,” he says.
“I love the idea of CERN becoming an antimatter Glovo,” he adds.
Ace antiparticles are like their normal counterparts, except they have the charge and inverted magnetic properties. Although matter is abundant, antimatter occurs naturally only very rarely.
No one knows, when both should have been created in equal quantities during the Big Bang.
O CERN produces antimatter by colliding beams of protons against a dense metal and then using electric and magnetic fields to slow and capture the emerging antiprotons. Most particles are lost in the meticulous process.
To develop a “portable trap” for particles in which they never touch walls containing matter, scientists had to power a superconducting magnet system and use cryogenics to cool it to a frigid −269 °C.
The bottle had to be maintained in a high vacuum to prevent the antimatter from encountering any stray matter particles and being annihilated along the way; all equipment had to withstand the forces of traveling in a truck.
The team installed a detector, which meant they could check for antiprotons from the driver’s seat.
A single gram of antimatter would cost billions of euros to produce, and its annihilation would release as much energy as a nuclear bomb. But based on CERN’s current production rate, it would take ten times the age of the Universe to accumulate that amount, says Ulmer.
The next phase of the project, known as BASE-STEPwill probably pass through deliver the precious cargo to another CERN buildingwhere the team can practice transferring the antiprotons to another trap, says Smorra.
The team also plans to take the antiprotons about 700 km to Düsseldorfwhere the HHU team will use a new experimental laboratory, currently under construction, to study them around 2029.
To measure the mass of the antiproton With extreme precision, physicists must measure their activity in a magnetic field, but the antimatter factory is full of fluctuating magnetic noise. Moving to a new location could improve measurement accuracy by 10 to 1000 times, says Ulmer.
“For the BASE collaboration, this is really the starting point for entirely new types of experiences,” he says.
“The behavior of antimatter It’s such a mystery that any new information would be very welcome to us,” says Shears. And the differences between the behavior of antimatter and matter “could help us understand how and why our Universe evolved and looks the way it does,” he says.
“It is one of the most fundamental mysteries in our field, and I hope that precise measurements on antimatter samples from CERN can give us new clues”, he concludes.
