Antimatter traveled by truck for the first time

Special delivery: antimatter.

Scientists have completed the first-ever transport of antimatter by truck. On March 24, researchers carried antiprotons, the negatively charged counterparts of protons, inside a magnetic trap on a truck. The particles, created at the European particle physics laboratory CERN in Geneva, traveled about eight kilometers to another site within the lab before the trap was delivered, contents intact.

That’s quite a feat because antimatter annihilates when it comes into contact with matter. So the antiprotons were corralled with electromagnetic fields to prevent them from banging into the walls of their container while trucking along.

The demonstration, which followed a test with protons in 2024, is part of an effort called BASE-STEP. Eventually, scientists hope to use BASE-STEP’s technology to bring antiprotons from CERN to facilities around Europe. There, scientists will build carefully controlled experiments, free from the stray magnetic fields pervading the accelerator facility at CERN that produced the antimatter.

Those careful experiments could help scientists better understand why matter is common in the universe, while antimatter is rare. It’s thought that the Big Bang produced matter and antimatter in equal parts. Something must have tipped the balance in matter’s favor. So scientists have been carefully scrutinizing antimatter particles’ properties, such as their charge-to-mass ratios, atomic energy levels, response to gravity and the like, to search for any discrepancies with matter.

The new portability demonstration is the first step toward antimatter experiments of a new level of quality, physicist Stefan Ulmer of RIKEN in Wako, Japan, said at a news conference announcing the achievement. “This is a starting point of a really exciting journey.”