Antimatter to be transported outside a lab for first time — in a van
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.
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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.
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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.
Trapping antiprotons
The specialized ‘traps’ needed to store the antiprotons during their journey have been years in the makingtaken years. In October, BASE-STEP conducted a dummy run, transporting regular matter in their trap on the back of a truck. On 4 December, the PUMA team plans to ship its empty trap from where it’s been built at TU Darmstadt to CERN. There, the team will insert antimatter into the contraption and start tests.
To move antimatter, physicists must suspend and cool it in magnetic ‘bottles’. These require superconducting magnets to hold antiprotons in place, so that they hover without touching the sides. A mobile power generator willpower the magnets, and a cooling system that will keep the antiprotons at a chilly 4 kelvin (−269 ºC). Liquid helium will act as a back-up coolant.
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Perhaps the greatest challenge is maintaining a high vacuum to prevent antimatter meeting stray matter particles and annihilating. This must be done while creating systems to let antimatter out or to allow other materials into the trap to perform experiments. All of the kit needs to be portable and adapted to withstand the forces and vibrations of being on the road. “I certainly think this is feasible, just difficult,” says Dunlop.
No official regulations yet exist about how antimatter should be transported, says Obertelli. Author Dan Brown raised fears about the dangers of the substance in his book Angels and Demons, in which terrorists steal one-quarter of a gram from CERN for use as a bomb. Obertelli says there’s no need for worry. Even if all the antiprotons PUMA plans to carry were to annihilate at once, the energy released would be equivalent to the impact of a pencil dropped from table height, he says. “There is no bang.”
The BASE-STEP trap being loaded onto a lorry during a rehearsal for antimatter transport.Credit: CERN
