I’ve got a ton of rage-inducing stuff in the pipeline which I hope to start putting up here and there soon. But I promised some respite, and I’m a content-generator of my (often deadline-missing) word, so here’s a bit of fun for your Wednesday afternoon.
Humankind has just witnessed its latest never-before achievement. Yesterday a truck hit the road within the CERN campus near Geneva. It was transporting very, VERY carefully a cargo created within that laboratory, Europe’s particle physics research center.
That cargo was antimatter. To be precise, that truck transported a grand total of 92 antiprotons, produced in a facility at CERN known informally as the antimatter factory.
Antimatter is just like the ordinary matter you and I are made of, but for one crucial difference: each of its particles has the opposite charge of its ordinary matter counterpart. An antiproton has a negative charge instead of the positive charge of the protons in the nuclei in every atom in our bodies/the universe, for example. (There are a handful of other reversed properties, but that’s the gist.)
One other thing: matter and its anti- counterpart really, REALLY don’t like each other. If an anti-proton comes into contact with a scrap of ordinary matter, it goes BOOM!—the two particles annihilate.
So antimatter is hard to make in a world full of the other stuff, and once created (which CERN does by ramming protons into metal targets and then capturing a small fraction of the anti-protons created in the flash of collision energy), is even harder to preserve.
To simplify a lot, the way to hang on to antimatter in this vale of tears is to trap it in such a way that it never comes into contact with its surroundings. Doing so requires extreme cold—four degrees K above absolute zero; as near a complete vacuum as technically achievable; and superconducting magnets to hold the antiprotons in a tight enough grasp to ensure they never strike the sides of the containment vessel.
This is not an easy task in a lab. Now imagine what it would take if an antiproton developed an urge for going.* The need to figure out how to transport antimatter arose because the CERN is an electromagnetically busy place, and some of the experiments researchers hoped to perform with antimatter couldn’t be done except in a much more pristine setting—which is being built in Dusseldorf, Germany, 700 kilometers from Geneva.
So the laboratory’s antimatter folks found themselves in the trucking business. Getting antiprotons to become rolling cargo involved designing a traveling version of the containment technology used in the lab. Today marked the first test of the system. A box truck set off on what accumulated into a half-hour, eight kilometer drive—a careful journey, topping out at forty-two kilometers per hour.
Antimatter is implicated in a range of fundamental questions, among them, why there is so much matter and so little antimatter in our universe (which is a good thing from a wholly selfish point of view; if the Big Bang had generated equal amounts of both forms of matter, as some calculations suggest it could have, then there’d be nothing in our neighborhood but the residue of the vast mutual annihilation of the two species of particles). So there’s a lot riding on the ability first to create a storable stock of antiparticles and then to get it into the right environment for ultra-precise measurement.
A five mile jaunt on a secured right of way is only the beginning. It will be a while yet before you can DoorDash an order of anti-hydrogen with some frites on the side. But it is amazing for all of that. Human beings have managed to reach into the realm previously reserved for action on a cosmological scale—and now the antimatter show has hit the road.
To put this another way: we just witnessed the Winter Olympics. We saw extraordinarily accomplished people do exceptional things. While almost every last person watching will never attempt, much less land, a quad axel or a 1620 rotation on a freestyle jump, it is thrilling to witness, to know it can be done.
Same here, learning of those 92 antiprotons made it out and back safely using machinery that is at the very limit of what humankind knows how to build.
More detail at the source for this post.
*Inevitable soundtrack. Inevitable alternate soundtrack.
Image: Joseph Stevens, Enemies, 1854
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