Scientists at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have achieved something that has never been done before in the history of science: transporting antimatter. On March 24, a research team successfully moved 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields, with the bottle travelling on the back of a truck on a 30-minute journey around the laboratory’s site, covering more than eight kilometres at a maximum speed of 42 kilometres per hour. The achievement marks a defining moment for the field of particle physics, one that researchers at the facility have been working toward for decades.
Antimatter is matter’s equal and opposite counterpart. When the two come into contact, they annihilate each other entirely, converting into energy — a property that makes antimatter extraordinarily difficult to store or move. CERN remains the only place in the world that produces usable quantities of antiprotons, doing so by colliding beams of protons into a dense metal target and using electric and magnetic fields to slow and capture the antiprotons that emerge from the collision. The painstaking process means that most particles are lost during production, making even a modest quantity of captured antiprotons a significant scientific resource. The experiment’s ultimate goal is to transport the antiparticles to a location free of experimental interference, where antiprotons can be studied with greater precision than is currently possible within CERN’s antimatter factory.
Stefan Ulmer, a physicist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf who was part of the team, described the moment as something humanity has never done before, calling it historic and noting that the antimatter community gathered to celebrate with champagne. Christian Smorra, the physicist at the same institution who led the project, noted that physicists who created the antimatter factory more than 30 years ago had dreamed that transporting the material would one day be possible, and that day had finally arrived. Tara Shears, a physicist at the University of Liverpool, described the feat as a great technological achievement, noting that antimatter is the most fragile type of matter in existence and that driving it around CERN’s site amounted to a technological marvel, adding with some humour that she loved the idea of CERN becoming the Deliveroo of antimatter.
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