Like the parents of a newborn child preparing for its first trip in a car, physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are taking all precautions in preparation for the first transportation of their antimatter.
Antimatter is a still little understood mirror copy of ordinary substance, which really resembles a child poking his hands in different directions and trying to enter into dangerous contact with the world. But unlike a child, the contact of antimatter with the world threatens not with injury, but with a terrifying explosion. Therefore, you cannot take a grain of antimatter and, hiding it with an iron container, throw it into the back of a truck: at the moment of contact of antimatter with the atoms of the container, a catastrophe will occur.
CERN is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. In the course of various experiments, antimatter has been created here for a long time, but its capture and subsequent storage is an extremely ambitious task. That is why CERN has appointed a special project for this exact task - the so-called PUMA (antiProton Unstable Matter Annihilation).
PUMA's project is about transporting antimatter on its first journey. At the moment, this will only move a few hundred meters from the point of birth - moving to the location of a neighboring project known as ISOLDE. However, this short journey will require at least four years of intensive research and preparation.
To complete this epic voyage, CERN researchers are developing special equipment and techniques with which they lock antiprotons like in a bottle. Since the antimatter under no circumstances should touch the walls of the container, a vacuum will be created in the container, inside which the antimatter will be held by a magnetic field.
At the moment, a capsule is being created that allows one billion antiprotons to be stored at a time, which is 100 times more than previous technologies allowed. Moreover, this capsule could store antiprotons for several weeks, which would ensure a slow and safe process of movement.
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The ISOLDE project will use these displaced antiprotons in experiments to better understand neutron stars, which are the super-condensed cores of large stars. Antimatter may be the key to better understanding these distant objects, as well as many of the mysteries of the cosmos. For example, answering such questions: why is there more and more matter in the world than antimatter? What is dark matter made of?
By understanding how to produce, find, transport, and potentially use antimatter, we could not only develop practical applications for antimatter, but we could also provide answers to questions that scientists have been asking for decades.