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Antimatter to be transported outside a lab for first time — in a van

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2024-11-26 15:30:04

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The antiProton Unstable Matter Annihilation, or PUMA, is a compact experiment designed to carry antiprotons from CERN’s Antimatter Factory to the laboratory’s ISOLDE facility Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN (CC-BY-4.0)

Two teams of CERN physicists are racing to perform an extraordinary feat: transporting antimatter for the first time. Antimatter — matter’s mirror image — is difficult to create and extremely short-lived, because on contact with matter it instantly annihilates. One team wants to move the antimatter so that it can be studied with greater precision, and the other will use it to probe materials in the first experiments of their kind.

“If you can do it, it opens up a huge number of opportunities,” says James Dunlop, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, whose research includes observing antimatter on nanosecond scales.