Two teams of CERN physicists are racing to perform an extraordinary feat: transporting antimatter for the first time. Antimatter — matter’s mirror image — is difficult to create and extremely short-lived, because on contact with matter it instantly annihilates. One team wants to move the antimatter so that it can be studied with greater precision, and the other will use it to probe materials in the first experiments of their kind.
“If you can do it, it opens up a huge number of opportunities,” says James Dunlop, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, whose research includes observing antimatter on nanosecond scales.
Antimatter falls down, not up: CERN experiment confirms theory
Every matter particle has an antimatter counterpart: its mirror image, with an opposite charge. Physicists think that antimatter and matter were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang. But why the Universe now seems to be made overwhelmingly of ordinary matter is a mystery.
Antimatter is thought to be the most expensive substance on Earth — it would cost trillions of dollars to make a gram. CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland, is the only place in the world that makes antiparticles slow enough to catch and store, and hopefully transport, without annihilating. Two projects there — PUMA (antiProton Unstable Matter Annihilation) and BASE-STEP — are aiming to transport antimatter to other labs, probably in the second half of next year.
Antimatter delivery
Each team is taking antimatter on the road for different reasons. BASE-STEP wants to move antiprotons — counterparts to protons — to a location free from experimental noise, where they can be examined in finer detail. PUMA plans to transport antiprotons to a facility in which other short-lived materials are made, and use the antimatter to probe their nuclear structures.
Each project’s maiden trip will take just a few hours, and will venture only across the CERN site. But eventually the teams hope to make longer journeys to universities around Europe, giving more labs the opportunity to experiment with antimatter. BASE-STEP aims to transport antiprotons some 700 kilometres to the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, where some of its team is based.
The race to reveal antimatter’s secrets
This kind of delivery service “would democratize the use, or the study, of antimatter”, says Alexandre Obertelli, a physicist at the Technical University of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt) in Germany, and architect of the PUMA experiment.
