World first: CERN team succeeds in transporting antimatter

Scientists at CERN achieved an unprecedented feat on Tuesday: transporting antiprotons by road, a crucial step towards delivering antimatter to other laboratories in Europe.

“The particles came back… so it’s a success,” rejoiced CERN physicist Stefan Ulmer in front of a few journalists after the return of a truck that traveled 10 kilometers on the campus of the main European physics laboratory.

Mr. Ulmer, spokesperson for CERN’s “Base” experiment studying the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe, assured that this marked the “start of a new era”.

Visible matter and its mysterious twin, antimatter, are considered nearly identical, except for their reversed charges and magnetic properties. Scientists are still questioning why our universe contains much more matter than antimatter, despite theoretically the Big Bang should have created an equal amount.

When antimatter comes into contact with matter, it annihilates, disappearing in a flash of energetic particles. Moving antimatter particles poses a colossal challenge, now successfully overcome.

“It’s great, it opens up a lot of possibilities,” exclaimed Francois Butin, technical coordinator of CERN’s antimatter factory, the only laboratory in the world where antiprotons can be produced, stored, and studied.

The accelerators and particle decelerators of the antimatter factory generate fluctuations in the magnetic field that affect the measurements of the antiprotons on-site.

To address this issue, scientists found a way to trap antiprotons in a special ion trap for transfer to other more stable facilities where they can be studied with extreme precision.

“We are seeking to understand the fundamental symmetries of nature, and we know that by conducting these experiments outside of this accelerator, we can achieve measurements 100 to 1,000 times more precise,” explained Mr. Ulmer.

“A resounding success”

For this world-first attempt at transporting antimatter, a cloud of 92 antiprotons was captured and stored in a transportable cryogenic trap.

The device includes a superconducting magnet, a cryogenic cooling system using liquid helium – which cools the antiprotons to 8.2 kelvins (-268°C) to slow their speed – energy sources, and a vacuum chamber trapping the antiparticles using magnetic and electric fields.

Dozens of helmeted CERN scientists assisted in the delicate lifting of the object resembling a large wardrobe containing the 850-kilogram trap by a giant ceiling crane in the antimatter workshop, which was then loaded onto a flatbed truck.

“The most critical part is on the road because the vibrations are more significant there,” said Marcus Jankowski, AFP security manager in CERN’s experimental physics department.

The truck, sporting the inscription “Antimatter on the move” on its sides, slowly crossed the CERN campus as Mr. Ulmer followed in a car, eyes fixed on his phone displaying the vital signs of antimatter, namely the characteristic vibration frequency of the antiprotons, depicted as an M with two peaks.

The height of the peaks indicates the number of trapped antiprotons, he explained, clarifying that if the frequency reduces to a single peak, it indicates that the antiprotons have annihilated.

During the transport, it seemed to slightly change, but Mr. Ulmer later indicated that it was the detector’s resonance frequency that varied by a few hertz due to the truck’s vibration.

“The particles are still in the same position… It’s a resounding success,” he later rejoiced.

In the long term, CERN plans to send antiprotons to different laboratories in Europe, starting with its precision laboratory in Düsseldorf, an eight-hour drive away.

The biggest challenge will then be transferring the antiprotons once the antimatter has reached its destination without them disappearing. Tests are ongoing, as indicated by CERN officials.