Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) pulled off an incredible feat this week: successfully transporting antimatter in a humble box truck for the first time. While the trip was a short one, it marks an achievement that’s years in the making, and it could eventually help solve one of the great mysteries of our universe.
Antimatter particles occur naturally in the universe but can only be artificially created on Earth at CERN’s antimatter factory. They’re like normal particles except they have a reversed electric charge and magnetic moment, which makes them an incredibly volatile substance (or antisubstance). If antimatter comes into contact with any matter at all—even for a moment—both will be instantly annihilated, releasing energy.
Obviously, that makes packaging antimatter for transport something of a puzzle. To prepare it for the trip, particle physicists and engineers working on the BASE-STEP project first had to design and build a trap that would keep it suspended for the voyage. Known as a Penning trap, this device keeps the antimatter suspended in a vacuum using supercooled magnets. It also weighs around 2,000 pounds and took nearly three hours to move through the CERN facility to be loaded up for the trip.
Credit: CERN.
With all that hardware you might expect the antimatter load to be substantial, but the researchers collected just 92 antiprotons for the maiden voyage—an infinitesimally small amount. While social media users joked about a universe annihilating event if things went wrong, the tiny amount of antimatter would barely release a whisper of energy if it did come into contact with matter.
Still, researchers say, this new milestone paves the way for further study on the exotic substance that could reveal the secrets of our universe. According to our current understanding of the laws of physics, the Big Bang should have produced an equal amount of matter and antimatter, and yet the fact that you’re reading this right now proves that there is, indeed, more matter than antimatter out there.
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“Our aim with BASE-STEP is to be able to trap antiprotons and deliver them to our precision laboratories at a dedicated space at CERN, HHU, Leibnitz University Hannover, and perhaps other laboratories that are capable of performing very-high-precision antiproton measurements, which unfortunately is not possible in the antimatter factory,” Christian Smorra, the leader of the project said in a statement. “We validated the feasibility of the project with protons last year, but what we achieved today with antiprotons is a huge leap forward toward our objective.”
They’ve still got a ways to go, though. The battery for the trap can only keep the magnets cool enough for a four-hour trip, and the closest laboratory is eight hours away in Germany.
Either way, if you see the CERN truck on the autobahn, remember to keep your distance. 
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Lead image: jpgon / Adobe Stock