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How Do We Transport Antimatter?
We have finally had to develop a way of transporting antimatter by truck.
CERN, home to the world’s largest particle collider, located on the border between Switzerland and France, produces large amounts of antimatter. However, the powerful magnetic fields required for the collider’s operation make certain experiments on antimatter particles impossible to carry out at the facility itself.
This means that these precious particles sometimes have to be transported to other laboratories. Antimatter may be the most expensive substance in the world: a single gram has been estimated to cost somewhere between 70 and 2,700 trillion dollars. Of course, we have never actually produced or collected a gram of it.
For the experiments in question, transporting a few thousand antiprotons will be sufficient. To put that into perspective, one gram of antimatter would contain approximately 10^23 antiprotons.
A truck capable of carrying antimatter has now been built in Switzerland. Although it will transport only a few thousand antiprotons, the vehicle itself weighs several tons. It needs powerful batteries to generate magnetic fields, keep the particles at…
