Antimatter Trucker is finally a job title! But don’t worry, this isn’t going to be “The Wages of Fear, 2026”:
“The device on Cern’s truck will carry about 1,000 antimatter particles, weighing about a billionth of a trillionth of a gram. Should the containment fail, and the antimatter make contact with normal matter, the resulting pulse of energy would be so feeble, the load doesn’t even warrant a radioactive label.”
They actually did it!
“On 24 March, a team at CERN transported 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields. The bottle travelled on the back of a truck, for a 30-minute journey ... ”
If you’re wondering how they knew they had 92 antiprotons in their trap, and didn’t lose any along the way, the answer is “image current detection”.
When a charged particle moves past a metal plate, its electric field induces a current in it, with no need for the particle to actual touch anything. That current was monitored to keep track of the contents of the trap.
“Monitoring the antiprotons in real-time: a standard non-destructive image current detection technique is used – this technique is routinely available in precision Penning-trap experiments – so the team gets a continuous signal showing the amount of particles in the trap.”
https://home.cern/science/cern/antimatter-transportation-media-kit
Greg Egan
Erin
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