CERN transports 92 antiprotons by road

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In March 2026, researchers at CERN in Geneva successfully transported 92 antiprotons by truck for the first time. This marks a new milestone in handling antimatter.

The team from the BASE experiment, led by Stefan Ulmer and Christian Smorra from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, used a purpose-built portable trap. Antimatter is incredibly unstable and vanishes upon touching ordinary matter. To prevent this, the vessel acts like a high-tech vacuum-sealed container that suspends the particles in place. Moving the trap out of the main accelerator allows physicists to conduct ultra-precise experiments at different laboratories across Europe.

This success follows the team's earlier achievement in October 2024, when they first used the same mobile trap to transport regular protons. By proving the hardware works for both particle types, the BASE researchers have shown that antimatter no longer needs to be trapped inside a massive, stationary facility to be studied. The team successfully kept the antiprotons inside the mobile vessel for over a month.

#CERN #Antimatter #Physics

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