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A truck is making a historic journey around the CERN facility on the French-Swiss border, transporting the world’s most expensive materials for the first time.
The antimatter inside is manufactured by CERN’s massive particle accelerator, and the antimatter particles are then slowed down and captured for storage, charging and study.
Antimatter is the mirror opposite of matter. The specific type of antimatter transferred was 92 antiprotons, which is the negative charge equivalent of the positively charged protons found in ordinary matter. This puzzling and precious material could hold the key to solving some of the biggest looming mysteries in physics, dating back to the origins of our universe.
An animation of the Penning trap that holds antiprotons in place, preventing them from destroying surrounding matter.
When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate, converting most of their mass into pure energy. This reaction is the stuff of science fiction, where spaceships and superweapons are powered. However, with current technology, it would take billions of years to obtain enough antimatter to cause any serious damage.
Annihilation is routine at CERN’s antimatter factory, occurring on a small scale with individual particles and shown as a line on a graph (pictured below).
This is what it looks like to scientists when matter and antimatter annihilate.
One mystery that studying antimatter can solve is why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the observable universe, a question with roots dating back to the Big Bang.
So far, science shows that matter and its antimatter equivalent are opposites of identical weight and magnetism. Stefan Ulmer, founder and spokesman for the BASE experiment at CERN, believes that more precise measurements could help find discrepancies that may hold the key.
Searching for these discrepancies means that antimatter particles must leave their birthplace at CERN because the same massive magnets needed to produce antimatter also make them difficult to study due to magnetic interference.
This may seem like a lot of work to get more precise measurements of particles, but Ulmer says that searching for answers to the biggest questions in science “makes you creative,” and this is his version of heaven.
To see the truckload of antimatter make its historic journey, watch the video in this article.
