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Antimatter: coming soon to a lab near you?

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Antiprotons have been transported by road at CERN. This advance might one day enable laboratories outside the site to use antimatter in their experiments.

By

  1. Nancy Paul

    1. Nancy Paul is at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory, Paris 75005, France.

  2. Davide Gamba

    1. Davide Gamba is at CERN, Meyrin 1217, Switzerland.

Scientists spend a lot of time ordering things: laboratory equipment, samples and consumables. What if a researcher’s to-do list included ordering an antimatter delivery? In March, the BASE Collaboration brought that reality one step closer. Writing in Nature, Leonhardt et al. sealed 92 antiprotons in a specialized ultrahigh-vacuum trap, loaded them into a truck and drove them out of the Antimatter Factory (AMF) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland1. The antiprotons did not go very far, just on a 7.5-kilometre joyride through the lab grounds. But if antimatter can survive a few kilometres on the campus roads, it could, in principle, be delivered to research facilities much farther afield.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02647-6

References

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Competing Interests

The authors are colleagues of the BASE collaboration as a fellow scientists working at the CERN AD/ELENA facility, and thus interact with them regarding facility resources and long-term facility strategy.

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