Antimatter has been transported by road for the first time

Antimatter has finally hit the road. About 100 antiprotons took a 20-minute journey on a truck around the campus of the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The demonstration is the first test of a future antimatter delivery service, which scientists hope will one day see antiprotons transported on demand to laboratories across Europe to study their mysteries.

“I am very happy that we are now at the stage where it is possible to [transport antimatter]”, says CERN’s Christian Smorra. “It’s been a long journey, and it’s taken a lot of sweat and tears to make it work.”

All matter has an antimatter counterpart, which is theoretically identical except for an opposite charge. A positron, for example, is the antimatter version of an electron. When an antimatter particle meets its matter counterpart, it annihilates, creating new particles or a flash of energy, making storage and testing of antimatter properties precarious.

Only in recent decades have scientists in CERN’s Antimatter Decelerator Hall, known as the Antimatter Factory, been able to produce and store enough antimatter, such as antiprotons, to carry out experiments and better understand its properties. The hope is that further experiments will reveal why we live in a universe dominated by matter and not its counterpart.

To slow antiprotons from the near-light speeds at which they are created, scientists use strong magnetic fields, but this makes it difficult to test the magnetic properties of the antiprotons themselves. In 2018, Smorra and his team launched the STEP (Symetry Tests in Experiments with Portable antiprotons) project, a portable container using a tank of liquid helium and powerful magnetic fields that would eventually allow the antiprotons to be transported to a magnetically quieter facility.

Today, the STEP project successfully completed its truck test around a 4-kilometer road loop on the CERN campus, transporting 92 antiprotons from the antimatter factory and back, with its cargo intact.

“This really opens up many more years of precision measurements, because it prevents them from being hampered by noise in the hall,” says Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University in Denmark, who leads the nearby ALPHA experiment that studies antihydrogen atoms.

Smorra and his team hope to ultimately demonstrate that the STEP project can go much further than just CERN, providing antimatter to magnetically silent laboratories across Europe. This could take several years, however, as much of CERN will be closed to allow for the Large Hadron Collider upgrade, which won’t be completed until the end of 2028.

CERN and Mont Blanc, dark and frozen matter: Switzerland and France

Prepare to be blown away by CERN, Europe’s center for particle physics, where researchers operate the famous Large Hadron Collider, nestled near the charming Swiss lakeside town of Geneva.