‘Antimatter‘ is one of those few exotic terms from modern physics that have managed to get into the general lexicon thanks to science fiction. According to our current understanding of the formation of the universe, after the Big Bang two types of matter were created: ordinary particles that make up everything we see around us—from stars to the chair you’re sitting in—and ‘anti-particles’ that are their exact mirror image, except they possess an opposite electric charge and magnetic momentum (electrons are not the antiparticles of protons, those are called antiprotons).
Since the Big Bang should have created an equal amount of matter and anti-matter, the fact that the amount of the latter is so disproportionately minuscule makes for one of the biggest mysteries in science.
The reason antimatter is the darling of sci-fi writers is because it is so unstable that when it comes into contact with ordinary matter, they annihilate each other with the most energetic reaction known in Nature. The crude efficiency of our standard nuclear fission reactors pales in comparison with what a large-scale anti-matter reactor could do —a mass of 1 kg of antimatter contains an energy of 90 million gigajoules, equivalent to worldwide energy consumption over 90 minutes—which is why they were conceived as the power source for starships in the Star Trek universe since its conception in the 1960s.
Unfortunately, making antimatter is very hard. The only place in the planet where it is currently created is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva Switzerland, where the total number of anti-particles since they started conducting experiments amounts to a tiny, tiny fraction of a gram.
And now, for the first time, CERN has reported they managed to successfully test an antimatter ‘trap’ that is compact and sturdy enough to fit into a truck, where it was moved across their campus from their Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) facility. The cryogenic trap was able to contain the highly volatile particles through a powerful magnetic field that prevent them from reacting with the walls of the container.
“Our aim with BASE-STEP is to be able to trap antiprotons and deliver them to our precision laboratories at a dedicated space at CERN, HHU, Leibnitz University Hannover and perhaps other laboratories that are capable of performing very-high-precision antiproton measurements, which unfortunately is not possible in the antimatter factory,” explains Christian Smorra, the Leader of BASE-STEP. “We validated the feasibility of the project with protons last year, but what we achieved today with antiprotons is a huge leap forward towards our objective.”
The containing device weighs a tonne and was filled with a cloud of just 92 antiprotons; meaning we’re a long way to go before reaching the scenario proposed in Dan Brown’s best selling novel Angels and Demons, in which a scientist discovers a way to create antimatter in ‘large’ quantities (a whopping whole gram, which would take the CERN lab abillion years to make with current technology). Which is just as well, since in the novel which was later adapted to a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks and Ewan McGregor in 2009 (the best one in the trilogy IMO) the cannister containing the anti-matter is lost, and is threatened to be used as a bomb powerful enough to wipe out the Vatican.
Who knows, maybe one day your grandkids will be receiving antimatter packages to power their homes the same way you order cheap trinkets via TEMU—so aside from solving big engineering problems, we would also have to solve porch piracy since it could become a terrorist threat!
