CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive. That they are considering sending it hundreds of km away is mind blowing.
- Any of the experiments really, but especially ATLAS is impressive.
- The antimatter factory. I found that the guides there are usually very passionate.
- The control centre if you can get a tour (this is the facility I delivered software to).
Took me a moment to understand it as well :)
The only thing I can think of that has a waiting period is if you want to visit the actual tunnels, you can only visit them in between experiments (every 10-20 years maybe even less often).
More info: https://visit.cern/
If the timing works out for you, you'll be able to visit both, the visitor center and CMS!
To me things like tokamak fusion reactors or rockets or even places like the massive piles of pipe work outside of SpaceX's launch site feel way cooler.
It's all in the eyes of the beholder.
I ended up working at another accelerator facility, so even though I am an IT guy, I actually understand what I am looking at, which helps to increase the enjoyment.
The complexity hiding within the pile is immense, and that is what makes it impressive to me.
I can just foresee a future asshole European mayor who swaggers into the CERN remote antimatter facility and shuts it all down, triggering Armageddon and a new rampage by the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man.
That part appears to severely downplay the absolutely mind-bending amount of data and the timewise density of it.
https://information-technology.web.cern.ch/sites/default/fil...
Pictures simply don't do it justice. One can't replace physical travelling and experiencing things (and people) for whatever purpose and this shows it well.
That being said, since I live not far from there, I certainly hope that containment is flawless, don't want to experience matter-antimatter annihilation of non-trivial amounts anywhere near my kids, or myself for that matter (NIMBYism at its best, get your damn antimatter off my lawn!)
This isn't every 5 years, the detectors are available for the public to visit every winter, and often at other times of the year as well.
You just described a tokamak fusion reactor. So at the end of the day you either know exactly what you're looking at and are in awe of the entire achievement, or have no idea what you're looking at and maybe are in awe of the massive pile of engineeringy looking bits and bobs.
Same effect visiting any massive chemical plant or oil refinery (because the processes usually require a lot of pipes, huge containers, and so on), that make you wonder "how on Earth do they even remember where everything is, let alone design and build it".
Not much different from art if you think about it. You can see a masterpiece painting, or some paint on a piece of cloth.
But for all of the above, when you know what those are, the impressive effect is amplified.
Yes: it is massive. There are few bigger experimental setups in the world.
A telescope is "just a mirror", yet any modern large telescope is awe-inspiring by virtue of its size.
I remember being literally stopped in my tracks by the Rosetta Stone. (It was closing and they were shooing us out.) There's nothing there that I haven't seen far more clearly (and it's not as if I can read any of its three languages), and yet somehow it felt Important.
Irrational, but real.
my brother worked down the hall from tbl, and we stopped by, but he was out. brother’s boss (mdm wu, of quark fame), was out of town too.
brother was the vms admin, and would bitterly complain that mdm wu never cleaned out her mail spool, and it was now a ruinous 40mb.
st genis is quaint and nice to visit, with views of mt blanc.
You got to realize they've built a giant circular vacuum tube surrounded by superconducting magnetic jackets that can steer and accelerate a particle beam (actually two going opposite directions), and giant cameras/calorimeters that image photons and other decaying particles from the beam collisions on the micrometer spatial scale. Each component individually may not be grand of scale and complexity but when taken as a whole it works together in amazing ways.
It's not just a massive pile of wiring and magnets etc, it's a massive pile of wiring and magnets which kicks particles around a race track the size of a small town, with absolutely insane timing precision before dumping them into targets the size of buildings, all generating unimaginably huge volumes of data which have to recorded in nanoseconds.
(Maybe I'm saying the obvious; sorry if that's the case ...) In perception, knowledge greatly affects what we 'see', on a physiological level - our brain's perceptual function is not at all purely sensory, but wired into the rest of our minds. People who have never drunk wine may say it's just unpleasant and a strong taste, and why drink it? People who know it well can perceive all sorts of things, from flavors to colors and more.
With knowledge, the wires, magnets, and electronics, like the sensations of wine, will reveal themselves. A good, passionate source can help ...
I mean I don't know much about the science they do other than the popular science summaries, but it's super interesting.
Also the persistence that is required because of the low "return on investment" is staggering. Another article linked from this one said:
> The authors had to mix 10 million positrons with 700 million antiprotons in order to get get 38 certifiable antihydrogen events.
I needed to know how much antimatter weighed and this article seemed helpful (though I am poorly placed to know if it’s correct).
https://gizmodo.com/how-much-does-antimatter-weigh-492195828
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10533407/
The interesting idea behind it is basically that for antimatter a potential wall, imagine a step function which is 0 for negative and 1 for positive and a wave that hits the wall from the negative to the positives, in theory it cannot propagate in the wall, turns out that one solution can propagate in that wall and that's antimatter: It basically sees the potential as inverted.
So since people were thinking about that they started considering that if it happens for EM interaction it could be the case for gravitation, that lead to wonder if the antimatter had different properties in that department.
From a pure theory point of view the mass of the particles and anti particles should be identical but they might have "fallen up" instead of falling down.
Note that if there are significant differences this would be extremely interesting but I am not deep enough into exotic theories that take into account those exotic cases to make more statements about the matter.
Which may have been true in a world where gravity was a charge or like the other forces. But it isn't. Everything with mass has mass. There is no detection of any sort of anti-mass, no matter the exotic possibilities such a thing would enable.
https://cfp.physics.northwestern.edu/documents/Transport.pdf
They built a trap, loaded it with electrons as a test, and drove 5000 miles from Martinez, CA (where the magnet was built) to Cambridge, MA. They mention some unexpected trouble after crossing the Rockies - the steadily increasing atmospheric pressure during the descent reduced helium boiloff rate, which reduced helium exhaust flow, and allowed moist air to flow back through the exhaust pipe, resulting in ice buildup. They cleared the blockage, but in doing so, lost the electrons!
I believe that they never repeated the trip with antiprotons. But hopefully the CERN delivery crew have learned from the experience, and won't run into similar trouble coming down from the Alps.
> ...changes in the truck's speed produced turbulence in the liquid helium, making measurements of its presence unreliable. Levels had dropped from about 75 percent of maximum to 30 percent by the time the system was reconnected, suggesting that liquid helium presents the key limiting factor in shipping.
This was after just a 4km stint around CERN campus.
They only had regular Protons in it for this test though. The point was to see if the Protons were still there after the 40 mph journey in a van
"Good lord, using what technology?"
"A DAF LF 180."
Although i have no idea what actual make or model they used - i was appalled to see that it was not stated in the materials and methods section of the paper. There's a photo in a news piece showing it's a small rigid-sided lorry:
https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take...
That will be the speed of light for you. Not exactly the speed of light, but 0.999... with a few 9's.
I agree, news like this make me optimistic too!
So just the charges are swapped around.
Charges interact with electric fields.
Gravity is related to mass. It doesn't matter whether the bulk of the mass comes from negatively or positively charged particles.
Of course, antimatter has opposite electrical attraction. If an antimatter plastic comb attracts antimatter styrofoam crumbs, those crumbs will be repelled by the matter plastic comb (luckily for them).
Neutrons are made of on up quarks and two down quark (and a lot of gluons).
Antineutrons are made of on up antiquarks and two down antiquark (and a lot of gluons).
There are no (anti)protons or (anti)electrons inside (anti)neutrons.
> Of course, antimatter has opposite electrical attraction.
Nitpicking: attraction -> charge
> If an antimatter plastic comb attracts antimatter styrofoam crumbs, those crumbs will be repelled by the matter plastic comb (luckily for them).
IIRC the charge in the comb induces a charge in the crumbs. If the charge of the comb is X, the -X charges move closer to the comb, and the X charges move far away. And that those displaced charges create a dipole that is attracted to the comb.
So I think the anti-comb would attract the normal-crumbs and create a huge explossion.
- or choose default shipping (no containment used, wait for spontaneous virtual quantum particle in your vicinity) approx delivery date Jul 23rd 32,345 AD
https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take...
Not even a cool new hazmat placard.
Of course both of these can be managed easily with appropriate procedures.
It is a bit like getting injured by pinching your hand in the hinge of the Velociraptor container in Jurrassic park. Not the first danger you would think of, but still present.
https://home.cern/sites/default/files/2024-10/1st-moving-cra...
We could use UN 2910 or maybe UN 0357
That "just" is not just a "just"! As far as I understand, given the low reserves of helium we have, using a largish quantity for an experiment must be a political decision as much as it has to be a technical one.
The US has subsidized Helium via this mindset for a long time.
Where I get confused is, after all these years, surely others could make a bigger effort? (unless the nature of US reserves put us in a unique position)
No-one will be exploding helicopters above the Vatican today.
It doesn't say how much material they moved though. If it was exactly 1 gram and they cancelled each other out perfectly (according to a quora answer, I refuse to trust AI but a random internet commenter is fine lmao), you've got 2 grams of mass converted to energy which is 180 terajoules or about 43 kilotons, which is about equivalent to 3 Hiroshima bombs.
Punching that into https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ gives a blast radius (of window destroying power) of 5.79 kilometers, or just over 100 km² of affected area.
Producing a gram would cost ~$2.7 quadrillion - https://ket.org/program/physics-girl/why-this-stuff-costs-27...
Or wait, do you double it since you're annihilating a picogram of matter and antimatter?
Either way, that's a bonkers amount of energy from picograms of mass.
Edit: Indeed you were quoting it :)
"Anything to declare?"
"Yes, antimatter."
"Value for customs?"
"Um..."
Jokes aside, this is really neat. But we should enjoy this 'Wild West' while it lasts. I suspect in generations to come once it's easy to manufacture, antimatter will surely become a controlled substance.
> "Yes, antimatter."
It offsets your other customs declarations.
Hmm actually this particular truck will go slower than one full of oranges so you have a better chance of survival.
The energy released by an automobile collision is roughly 10 to 100 times that much.
Imagine you're in a car crash and someone throws a big rock at the side of your vehicle. Or you're driving and a bird hits the windshield. That's the sort of scale we're looking at here, it's really not catastrophic.
1. Part that makes it move from the gun to the target. May be ordinary powder or reactive engine.
2. Part that creates an energy when bullet hits the target. That's where antimatter would be useful.
3. Part that converts energy to damage. For example compressed gas which gets very hot, expands and pushes shrapnel to hit things around with very big speed. There are many possibilities, but you need as much energy as possible to create as much damage, as possible in the end.
All money creation, pretty much, is accompanied with creating a corresponding debt.
Bankruptcy sometimes deletes anti-money but the 'money' stays. I'm not sure what role interest payments have (I think that's a case of transferring money around). The bankruptcy thing seems a bit like baryon asymmetry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sveriges_riksbanks_pris_i_ekon...
Not to mention the only way to create it is with energy (it doesn't exist on Earth), and we can only do so at terrible efficiencies. So even theoretically it's pretty bad.
Only about 0.01% of the energy used to operate the particle collider creates antimatter, the vast majority of which is impossible to capture. All in all, the efficiency of the entire process - if you were to measure it in the e^2=(pc)^2+(mc^2)^2 sense - is probably on the order of 1e-9 or worse.
tl;dr: strong magnetic fields in a certain configuration since in a strong enough field anti-hydrogen acts like little bar magnets.
If you want evil bombs, we already have nukes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma
(see discussion of the "Brillouin Limit")
Here, one might exploit the reaction p(p,pi+)d (or, rather, it's antimatter equivalent, which makes a negative pion), at a center of mass energy above threshold for creating the charged pion (which has a mass of 139.579 MeV. This is wildly energy negative, but if one has already invested many GeV in making each antiproton that's presumably acceptable. The cross section for this reaction is only ~200 microbarns, but that will be many orders of magnitude higher than the ordinary fusion cross section.
The solid antimatter one would probably target as an end goal would be anti-(lithium hydride).
Didn't stop people then. And it won't stop sufficiently criminal governments today.
Now do the same for Gaza and anywhere other than WWII Warsaw. Carpet bombing isn’t necessary if you can aim with precision at the support infrastructure of occupied structures.
Carpet bombing is not meant for eliminating military targets - it's an act of state-sponsored terrorism to get a population to rise against its leaders. Only, it has been proven over and over again: That doesn't work and often results in the exact opposite, making them rally behind the flag against the barbarous enemy who would attack civilians. Which is why we stopped doing that. Mostly.
And we don't even have to reach for nukes. Dynamite is also a better choice for blowing things up than antimatter.
Hmm. It sounds good until you realize that's two decimal places. Two decimal places is a pretty marginal gain for a lot of work.
A one inch gap is immense compared to a .01 inch gap.
There are a few properties of other particles with like 8 decimal places calculated theoretically and measured experimentally, and they are useful to validate the current standard model.
Actually, we expect some very very tiny asymmetry between matter and antimatter, but no one has measured that. I'm not sure how it would be visible in antiprotons. Perhaps a very tiny difference in the magnetic moment. Perhaps in the 17th digit that we will never measure. [1]
In any case it's interesting to confirm that our current models are correct or not.
[1] I'm not an expert in this area, but IIRC the problem is something like there is a little chance that the antiproton emits a photon that creates a electron and a positron, then it use the week force to transform into a muon that use the weak force to transform into a tauon that use the weak force to transform into an electron that colides with the original positron that was not doing nothing interesting meanwhile. Nobody is sure if all this transformations introduces a complex phase (a complex number of modulo 1) that cause a difference when you start with a antiproton instead of a proton. So, if there is a difference, it's probably something weird with a lot of intermediate virtual particles that cause a tiny difference in the 17th digit, or perhaps in the 1326th digit.