leephillips

Antimatter has been transported for the first time

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

Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN's truck

Physicists have succeeded for the first time in transporting the most expensive and most volatile substance on Earth — antimatter.

Mar 25 at 2:56pmWeb
Show threadvoidUpdate3d 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
Show threadcomrade12343d ago

What is that in firecrackers?

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

Show threadvoidUpdate3d ago
Wolfram Alpha says its approximately the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight
Show threadschindlabua3d ago
Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!
Show threaddandellion3d ago
Definitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and you can actually feel it hit your skin.
Show threadAnonbrit3d ago
It's a fraction of the energy released when an unlit fire cracker is dropped an inch. Basically unmeasurable
Show threadvivid2423d 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.
Show threaddylan6043d ago
Baby steps on our way to a Dan Brown scene lighting up the night sky
Show threadAnimalMuppet3d ago

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

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

Show threadluc_3d ago

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

Mirror: https://archive.ph/JkeMp

Show threadswiftcoder3d ago
I definitely was expecting "transported" to be some kind of teleportation when I clicked this link. Too much sci-fi!
Show threaddrob5183d ago
Totally sounded like Star Trek. LOL. I imagined Mr. Scott yelling something about the transporters not being able to lock onto the antimatter.
Show threadrbanffy3d ago
Much safer than Starfleet fuel tanks.
Show threadaftbit3d 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?
Show threadcsense3d 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.

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