In world first, antimatter taken on test drive at CERN
CERN scientists on Tuesday pulled off the unprecedented feat of transporting antiprotons by road, successfully test-driving the world's first antimatter delivery system, with an eye to one day supplying research labs across ...
"The particles returned... so this was a success," CERN physicist Stefan Ulmer told reporters after the large truck came back from a 10-kilometer drive around the campus of Europe's main physics laboratory.
While that might not sound like a big distance, Ulmer, a spokesman for CERN's BASE experiment probing the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe, said it marked the "starting point to a new era."
Visible matter and its mysterious twin antimatter are believed to be almost identical, except their charges and magnetic properties are reversed.
Scientists today still wonder why our universe contains far more matter than antimatter, when the Big Bang should have created an equal amount.
When antimatter comes in contact with matter it annihilates, disappearing in a flash of energetic particles.
Moving antimatter particles about is therefore a major challenge—one that has now seemingly been overcome.
Antimatter factory
"It's fantastic!" said Francois Butin, the technical coordinator of CERN's so-called antimatter factory—the only place in the world where antiprotons can be produced, stored and studied.
"This opens up so many possibilities," he told AFP.
The antimatter factory's particle accelerator and decelerator generate fluctuations that impact the measurements, limiting their precision.
A successful test drive of the world's first antimatter delivery system, conducted by CERN's BASE-STEP experiment.
A specially designed portable cryogenic Penning trap device filled with a cloud of 92 antiprotons is transferred onto the truck before the test drive begins.