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.
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.
- 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.