ANTIMATTER: CERN MANAGED TO TRANSPORT A TINY AMOUNT OF IT

After theorizing it, observing it, producing it and learning to control it, we have now managed to transport it too. Antimatter has traveled on a truck, for about five kilometers, inside CERN in Geneva.

It makes quite an impression, because antimatter is not exactly something you pick up and put in a box. If it comes into contact with ordinary matter it annihilates. To keep it you therefore have to leave it suspended in a vacuum, without letting it touch anything, using electric and magnetic fields. The real problem, then, was not only producing it, but managing to move the whole system without losing the antiprotons along the way.

At CERN they transported 92 of them. Very few, of course. But enough to show that it can be done.

And here it is hard not to think of Angels & Demons. That small vial of antimatter taken from CERN, carried to the Vatican and treated as a sort of ultimate device. The final scene, with the explosion over Rome, has stayed in many people’s memory.

Reality is much less spectacular, but perhaps more interesting. No bomb, no real danger: the quantities involved are infinitesimal. Yet something that until a few years ago seemed good for a novel has today become a real technical problem. Producing antimatter in one place and managing to carry it to another.

This could allow CERN to prepare it and other laboratories to study it with different instruments, without being forced to work exactly where it is produced.

For those who have been reading this magazine for a long time, antimatter is not a new subject. I was already talking about it in 2012 writing about Ettore Majorana, then again with Peter Higgs, with the LHC, with AMS and with Stephen Hawking. Many years have passed, but the underlying question is still there.

Why is there so much matter and so little antimatter?

If at the beginning of the Universe the two were almost symmetrical, something must have happened. And we still don’t know exactly what.

In the meantime we have reached a curious point in history: after learning to produce it and to preserve it, we can now also load antimatter onto a truck. For now, five kilometers. We’ll see about the rest.

– Related articles (in Italian) –

“Antimatter”, the Free Energy of the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana

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AMS, the antimatter hunter, helps us describe dark matter

Another record at CERN: extraordinary LHC, first collisions at 13 TeV

The theories of Stephen Hawking