Well, what do you know? Nature reports that a truck has taken some antimatter for a ride:
On 24 March, a team at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, 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 around the lab’s site outside Geneva, Switzerland.
The experiment’s ultimate goal is to take the antiparticles to a location free from experimental noise, where antiprotons can be studied in greater precision than is possible in the CERN “antimatter factory” where they are created.
CERN is the only place in the world that produces antiprotons in usable quantities. Many staff turned out with their phone cameras to capture the truck as it travelled more than 8 kilometres around the site, reaching a maximum speed of 42 km per hour.
“It is something humanity has never done before, it is historic,” says Stefan Ulmer, a physicist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), in Germany, and member of the team. “We bought a lot of champagne, and we invited the entire antimatter community to celebrate with us today.”
No comments:
Post a Comment