CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/cern-gears-up-to-ship-antimatter-across-europe/

87•ben_w•2d ago

Comments

rainmaking•2d ago

Do you think they can overnight me an antikindle?

avmich•2d ago

The bank servicing the transaction will have to upgrade their internal software for money representation.

jcalx•1d ago

CERN preparing a portable antimatter container right around the election of a new Pope? Sounds familiar [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_%26_Demons_(film)

AsmodiusVI•4h ago

Dan Brown is definitely taking notes.

boguscoder•3h ago

Or on contrary expecting some sort of royalties

fisherjeff•7m ago

Hopefully enough to afford another specially commissioned landscape by acclaimed painter Vincent van Gogh or a signed first edition by revered scriptwriter William Shakespeare

senectus1•3h ago

oh man, the conspiracy nuts are going to have fun with this.

thrance•2h ago

If I recall correctly, pope Francis was actually afraid the LHC would "open a gate to hell".

thaumasiotes•4h ago

> If the delivery can be made successfully—and it appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work—the new facility in Germany should allow measurements with a precision of over 100 times better than anything that has been achieved at CERN.

Hmm. It sounds good until you realize that's two decimal places. Two decimal places is a pretty marginal gain for a lot of work.

Loughla•3h ago

Two decimal places is a shit ton of precision though.

A one inch gap is immense compared to a .01 inch gap.

thaumasiotes•2h ago

Oh? When was the last time you needed 6.02 for Avogadro's number rather than 6?

Why is it that we don't bother trying to get more accurate than 6.023 in any context?

krastanov•16m ago

ugh... Needing more than 4 significant digits is a pretty baseline requirement for precision physics experiments meant to falsify various candidate theories. 2 new significant digits is a vast parameter space that now can be excluded.

Needing more than 4 significant digits happens to be crucially important for mundane boring stuff like the GPS navigation in your maps app working.

hubrix•2h ago

2 decimal places is the difference between employment and ownership. 100k vs 10MM. That is the comparison you really want to think about.

thaumasiotes•45m ago

No, 100k and 10,000k each have one decimal place. Two decimal places is the difference between 100k and 104k.

burnt-resistor•4h ago

Don't cross the streams.

m3kw9•4h ago

Why not use Amazon prime

m3kw9•4h ago

Why not use Amazon prime?

grg0•2h ago

I was amused when I misread "ship" as "shit". Amazon prime would have checked.

pezezin•2h ago

Last week I had the chance to visit CERN's Antimatter Factory, and let me tell you I was feeling like a child on Christmas Day.

The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive. That they are considering sending it hundreds of km away is mind blowing.

ednite•2h ago

That's awesome. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting CERN too. Curious, what part of the visit stood out as especially impressive? Last I checked, there was a pretty long waiting list for tours.

aaxa•14m ago

I worked at CERN a few years ago, so assuming they haven't build any new amazing facilities, these would be my top picks:

- Any of the experiments really, but especially ATLAS is impressive.

- The antimatter factory. I found that the guides there are usually very passionate.

- The control centre if you can get a tour (this is the facility I delivered software to).

mlindner•11m ago

I've seen this expressed before, but every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures?

To me things like tokamak fusion reactors or rockets or even places like the massive piles of pipe work outside of SpaceX's launch site feel way cooler.

queuebert•2h ago

If you can ship antimatter, you can drop it on people. Luckily, we are still orders of magnitude away from a bomb-sized amount.

sargun•2h ago

What's the biggest barrier to creating a lot of antimatter?

kadoban•2h ago

Nothing we do creates it at any kind of scale, and it's a pain in the ass to store.

Not to mention the only way to create it is with energy (it doesn't exist on Earth), and we can only do so at terrible efficiencies. So even theoretically it's pretty bad.

throwup238•2h ago

Energy. Creating a single anti-hydrogen atom requires an absurd amount of energy to first create a collision in a particle accelerator and then capture that anti-hydrogen before it eliminates against another atom.

Only about 0.01% of the energy used to operate the particle collider creates antimatter, the vast majority of which is impossible to capture. All in all, the efficiency of the entire process - if you were to measure it in the e^2=(pc)^2+(mc^2)^2 sense - is probably on the order of 1e-9 or worse.

mlindner•14m ago

Has there been research on more efficient ways to generate antiprotons? (By the way anti-hydrogen isn't how you would store it as anti-hydrogen can't be trapped.)

bawolff•1h ago

Making antimatter bombs really doesn't make sense. We can only make miniscule amounts of the stuff at very high cost.

If you want evil bombs, we already have nukes.

pfdietz•1h ago

Also, the amount of antimatter storable in a Penning Trap is limited such that its mass energy is comparable to the stored magnetic energy of the trap, which is small compared to the energy released by the same mass (as of the trap) of high explosives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma

(see discussion of the "Brillouin Limit")

DocTomoe•1h ago

There was a time that was said about nukes. They didn't really make sense. We were only able to make minuscule amounts of U-235 / Plutonium at very high cost... and had we wanted evil bombs, we had a thousand ways already to make them.

Didn't stop people then. And it won't stop sufficiently criminal governments today.

hedora•59m ago

Look up comparative damage stats for Tokyo and Hiroshima/Nagasaki in WWII. The nukes were nothing compared to firebombing.

Now do the same for Gaza and anywhere other than WWII Warsaw. Carpet bombing isn’t necessary if you can aim with precision at the support infrastructure of occupied structures.

modeless•1h ago

Why is there not a picture of the antimatter containment device? I hope it looks appropriately sci-fi.

nickt•1h ago

Not really.

https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take...

Not even a cool new hazmat placard.

db48x•35m ago

That’s because it’s not really a hazardous material. 70 antiprotons annihilating with 70 protons releases a grand total of 2×10⁻⁸ Joules.

mlindner•16m ago

That exponent is still a lot larger than I would've expected for something measured in three digits of atoms. I thought it would've been in the double negative digits.

SequoiaHope•22m ago

This thing? I think it looks super cool. An 80-20 rectangle stuffed with science stuff.

https://home.cern/sites/default/files/2024-10/1st-moving-cra...

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