Antimatter has been transported for the first time

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00950-w

117•leephillips•1h ago

Comments

voidUpdate•1h ago

If containment was to fail, it the total energy released would have been approximately 2.766 * 10 ^ -8 J, so it wasn't particularly dangerous

comrade1234•1h ago

What is that in firecrackers?

Gemini says a firecracker releases 150 J, so yeah not a lot.

voidUpdate•1h ago

Wolfram Alpha says its approximately the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight

schindlabua•48m ago

Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!

dandellion•25m ago

Definitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and you can actually feel it hit your skin.

api•7m ago

E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.

nikhilisvalid•2m ago

Wolfram Alpha says it's approximately _one-sixth_ the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight

Anonbrit•1h ago

It's a fraction of the energy released when an unlit fire cracker is dropped an inch. Basically unmeasurable

vivid242•1h ago

It was on the radio here (I live on its route)- the ‚receiving’ physicist said it would be way less than what we catch anyway from daily cosmic radiation.

dylan604•1h ago

Baby steps on our way to a Dan Brown scene lighting up the night sky

AnimalMuppet•47m ago

For 92 protons? So 3*10^-10 J per proton?

For a tiny number, that is still insanely high...

alansaber•1h ago

Only 92 antiprotons but still an exciting feat

observationist•47m ago

You (briefly) have an antiproton in your possession around once a day, assuming you get an average amount of sunlight. Some days, you might even have two!

cluckindan•42m ago

This just in: seasonal affective disorder confirmed to be caused by antiproton deficiency

luc_•1h ago

Setting the plot for Angels and Demons... :D

Mirror: https://archive.ph/JkeMp

brumbelow•1h ago

“Antimatter in a truck” is great headline material, but the actual advance is portable precision instrumentation.

CERN can make/store the antiprotons, but not measure them as cleanly as they want because the facility itself introduces tiny magnetic fluctuations. So this is really a story about moving the sample to a quieter lab, not moving toward sci-fi antimatter batteries... for now

imhoguy•57m ago

Next milestone: put it in Warptruck™ as fuel

GolfPopper•15m ago

Nonetheless, "moving antimatter by truck" is pretty SF. More grounded than epic space opera, but stillvery cool.

chuckadams•1h ago

Tell me this involved dilithium crystals. Please tell me this involved dilithium, I want to live in Gene's future.

rbanffy•24m ago

No. That would have created a warp field around the container.

swiftcoder•52m ago

I definitely was expecting "transported" to be some kind of teleportation when I clicked this link. Too much sci-fi!

drob518•28m ago

Totally sounded like Star Trek. LOL. I imagined Mr. Scott yelling something about the transporters not being able to lock onto the antimatter.

rbanffy•27m ago

Much safer than Starfleet fuel tanks.

fatbird•51m ago

Imagine the poor post-doc in the back of the truck, no seatbelt, watching and noting anything going on, while the driver is doing donuts in a parking lot to really stress-test the magnetic containment.

brendanfinan•48m ago

https://home.web.cern.ch/order

ozim•44m ago

Stop, driver should have license for hauling antimatter and as far as I believe no one is giving those out. That’s major offense in trucking industry.

post-it•39m ago

I'm glad we have an expert on Swiss commercial trucking regulations here.

jayrot•22m ago

I know this is all just tongue-in-cheek, but for the record, they only drove it around for 30 min around the lab site, not on the open roads.

ozim•13m ago

I only want to charge 1CHF for each charged particle hauled in that transport.

elil17•32m ago

Yes, only anti-truckers can haul anti-matter since normal CDLs only let you transport ordinary matter. You have to be very careful not to let the anti-trucker go to a ordinary truck stop because things really go down if they run into a ordinary trucker.

kakacik•15m ago

There is some good greta joke hidden there but I had enough dovnvotes for today

rbanffy•25m ago

Actually it should require an anti-license.

eternauta3k•33m ago

What would a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter look like?

drob518•27m ago

Annihilated.

rbanffy•27m ago

Very, very bright.

PowerElectronix•24m ago

It would depend on how it's distributed. If it's very homogeneous, totally anihilated. If there are galaxies of matter and galaxies of antimatter, more or less like us with a bit more background radiation.

isolli•3m ago

How do we know there are no antimatter galaxies far away from us?

a-priori•11m ago

It would develop into "regions" of space that are entirely matter and others that are entirely antimatter. The boundaries between them would glow as stray particles drift between the regions and is annihilated by contact with the opposing particles.

The fact that we don't see these glowing boundaries in space is evidence that there are not antimatter regions and that the visible universe is almost entirely composed of matter.

aftbit•24m ago

How could we make enough antimatter to do something useful? Would we need to go hang out near the sun or deorbit Jupiter's moons with superconducting coils to get enough energy?

csense•22m ago

From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity.

Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle.

Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?

d_silin•16m ago

Very tough engineering problem. Amount transported is 92 atoms. A mole (1 gram) of anti-hydrogen is 6.23x10^23 atoms.

wiredfool•7m ago

When I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock)

The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.

Sardtok•15m ago

Sounds like the start of research ending in antimatter bombs.

cozzyd•13m ago

pssh, antineutrinos are transported all the time!

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