Antimatter has been transported for the first time
Recorded: March 26, 2026, 4:02 a.m.
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Antimatter has been transported for the first time ever — in the back of CERN’s truck Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain Advertisement View all journals Search Log in Content About the journal Publish with us Subscribe Sign up for alerts RSS feed nature news article NEWS 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. By Elizabeth Gibney Elizabeth Gibney View author publications Search author on: Bluesky X Scientists successfully transported 92 antiprotons in a truck around CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory, using specialized bottles which prevent contact with matter.Credit: CERNAntimatter is matter’s equal and opposite. If the two meet, they annihilate each other, turning entirely into energy. This makes it incredibly difficult to store or move antimatter.On 24 March, a team at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, transported 92 antiprotons in a specially designed bottle that traps the particles using magnetic fields. The bottle travelled on the back of a truck, taking a 30-minute journey around the lab’s site.The experiment’s ultimate goal is to take the antiparticles to a location free of experimental noise, where antiprotons can be studied with greater precision than is possible in the CERN ‘antimatter factory’ where they are created.CERN is the only place in the world that produces usable quantities of antiprotons. Many staff members turned out with their mobile-phone cameras to capture the truck as it travelled more than 8 kilometres around the site, reaching a maximum speed of 42 kilometres per hour.“It is something humanity has never done before, it is historic,” says team member Stefan Ulmer, a physicist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) in Germany. “We bought a lot of champagne, and we invited the entire antimatter community to celebrate with us today.”How to transport antimatter — stick it on the back of a vanAntimatter can be used to study other phenomena, such as the structure of radioactive nuclei, or researched itself to unravel some of the Universe’s deepest mysteries. Physicists who created the antimatter factory more than 30 years ago dreamed that someday it might be possible to transport the material, says Christian Smorra, a physicist at the HHU who led the project. “Now it’s finally possible.”“This is a great technological achievement,” says Tara Shears, a physicist at the University of Liverpool, UK. Antimatter is the most fragile type of matter there is, so storing it, let alone driving it around CERN, is “a technological marvel”, she says.“I love the idea of CERN becoming the Deliveroo [a food-delivery company] of antimatter,” she adds.Antimatter DeliverooAntiparticles are like their ordinary counterparts, except with their charge and magnetic properties reversed. Although matter is abundant, antimatter occurs naturally only very rarely. No one knows why this disparity exists, when both should have been created in equal amounts during the Big Bang.CERN makes antimatter by colliding beams of protons into a dense metal, then using electric and magnetic fields to slow and capture the antiprotons that emerge. Most particles are lost in the painstaking process.Simulation of matter–antimatter creation on quantum platforms Enjoying our latest content? 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The successful transport of 92 antiprotons by CERN, utilizing a specially designed bottle and a truck traversing a 30-minute route, represents a historic milestone in physics. This achievement, spearheaded by teams at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and the Max Planck Institute for Physics, marks the first time antimatter has been moved, a feat previously deemed theoretically possible but practically insurmountable due to the inherent instability and destructive potential of matter-antimatter annihilation. Stefan Ulmer, a key physicist involved, emphasized the unprecedented nature of the event, describing it as humanity’s first attempt at transporting this volatile substance. The experiment’s primary objective is to relocate the antiprotons to a site free from experimental noise, a critical factor for achieving the exceptionally precise measurements sought by researchers. This endeavor builds upon decades of research initiated at CERN’s “antimatter factory,” where physicists have painstakingly created and studied antiprotons. Christian Smorra and his team, who led the project culminating in this transportation, recognized the need for a quieter environment to fully unlock the potential of these particles. The use of a magnetic bottle, effectively containing the antiprotons within a precisely shaped field, represents a sophisticated technological solution to the challenge of handling such unstable matter. Elizabeth Gibney highlights the delicate nature of this process, describing the bottle and its operation as “a technological marvel,” acknowledging the immense difficulty in preventing contact with ordinary matter. The transportation itself, occurring at a maximum speed of 42 kilometers per hour, underscores the relatively controlled manner in which these particles were moved. This isn’t a fundamental alteration of the antimatter’s properties, but a clever application of engineering to mitigate its inherent instability and allow for more precise observation. The experiment serves to validate long-held theoretical assumptions and opens the door to future research possibilities. The logistical challenge of moving antimatter, even over a relatively short distance, speaks to the significant advancements in containment and manipulation technologies within the field of particle physics. |