World’s First Antimatter Truck Carries Most Valuable And Volatile Substance on Earth

0:28This episode is brought to you by Indeed. of CERN recently, you might have seen a bit of a peculiar sight. A truck with a slogan written on the side antimatter in motion. And that's not poetry. It really had antimatter inside it. That's what we're talking about today on The World, The Universe and Us from New Scientist. I'm Dr Penny Sarchet. And I'm Dr Rowan Hooper and I am you can see how I'm grinning. Yeah, you're beaming. I'm a bit obsessed about this story. Alex Wilkins is here to feed this obsession. Alex, you just went to CERN to meet the team that are working with this antimatter. First, why do we need a truck to ferry around antimatter?

1:07Yeah, it's a kind of extraordinary sounding idea, putting antimatter on a truck and driving around CERN. Just to recap, it was 92 antiprotons, to be precise, and it was driven around the CERN campus for 20 minutes on this four-kilometre track. And this is the first step in what CERN hopes will be an antimatter delivery service. So this was kind of the proof of principle that one day we might be sending antimatter out on a little journey across Europe from CERN. Okay, so for people who only know antimatter as something from Star Trek, it's real, but tell us what it is. So we've actually known about antimatter for over a century.

1:44In the 1920s, the British physicist Paul Dirac, who was working on quantum mechanics, was looking at this equation, and you might remember from school, equations can have two solutions. They can have a negative and a positive solution. and he kind of saw that in this equation he was looking at that described the quantum world there were two solutions there but only one of them was accounted for in terms of matter so he thought this kind of implies that all matter has a counterpart which has the opposite charge so an electron which is negatively charged should have an antimatter counterpart called a positron which he didn't know the name for it then but that was his idea and then a few years later in 1932 scientists actually found this in cosmic rays and they found this kind of particle that had the same mass as an electron but the opposite charge, positively charged, and it was called then the positron.

2:32So it was something predicted from theory that they, a bit like the Higgs actually, that they then went out and found. Exactly, yeah. So just why was the positron not annihilated by an electron that it bumped into in the cosmic ray? So it would have been, it would have lived for a very short amount of time. And as you point out there, one feature of antimatter is that when it meets its counterpart, it then annihilates. But because it does survive, albeit for very short amounts of time, that does provide a window to kind of study it and look at its properties, which we'll get on to later. Okay.

3:05And also one other thing, just a little nitpicky thing, is what if the particle is neutral in the first place, like a neutron? How do you have an opposite form of it? So neutrons are actually composite particles. So within a neutron, you have quarks. and in the neutron's antimatter counterpart, you have antiquarks. Exactly. And those antiquarks have opposite charges, but when you add everything up, it comes out as neutral, but actually within the neutron or the antineutron, it's different. So a key feature of antimatter then is when it meets its matter counterpart, it annihilates, it cancels each other out, it's not there anymore.

3:43I imagine that makes transporting it quite difficult. talk us through what they're doing at CERN. Yeah so it was only in the 1980s that we actually managed to trap antimatter for long enough to to start studying it and over the past 40 years this whole industry at CERN has kind of sprouted up around studying antimatter and making experiments to find out what it's made of and last week I visited the place where this is all happening a place called the antimatter decelerator hall scientists there just call it the antimatter factory and it's the only place in the world that we can actually produce millions or even billions of anti-protons or antimatter on demand and then store it for long enough and currently it's home to seven different antimatter experiments and the one that i was interested in was the baryon antibaryon symmetry experiment or base for short and they have an experiment called step which i won't go into the acronym for and that's what this antimatter transport uh test was so baryonic matter is what is normal matter is what physicists call normal matter so that's the so baryon antibaryon is basically matter antimatter exactly yeah okay they've got this antimatter factory it sounds super cool but why but why are we doing this so the universe as far as we can tell is made of matter but we know that antimatter can exist and there's no obvious reason why there shouldn't also be loads of antimatter instead of matter like why isn't the electron positively charged not negatively charged and to answer that question which is one of these deep fundamental mysteries that we're that physicists want to answer we have to really study antimatter's properties at a really precise level the hope is that as we kind of learn about things like its mass and and and its charge and its kind of energy levels at some point it might differ slightly from normal matter and that then might be able to feed into our theories of what makes up matter and why that asymmetry exists in the first place.

5:40So it sounds like CERN's got this whole little industry of producing and studying antimatter. Why do they want to take it away? Why does it need to leave the building? So to study antimatter like they do there, it requires some immensely powerful magnetic fields. So when the antimatter is produced originally kind of as a byproduct of the particle accelerator, so the Large Hadron Collider there accelerates protons and smashes them into each other and occasionally you get antiprotons produced but they come off the accelerator at near the speed of light and it's really difficult to study antiprotons when they're traveling that fast so they employ these kind of anti-accelerators or decelerators using really powerful magnetic fields kind of working like the lhc in reverse and then they can slow it to within 10 the speed of light which is more manageable still fast still very fast yeah and to do that as i said you need these really powerful magnetic fields but then if you're trying to measure the magnetic properties of particles like antiprotons, which is one of these fundamental properties, that makes it really difficult because you have such powerful background fields kind of interfering with your experiment.

6:42So ideally, you would transport these antiprotons out of the factory to a specialist lab where there aren't any magnetic fields. And so this is taking them at 10 % the speed of light? I think you can slow them down further. I think some of the experiments study it at different phases. But you've got them trapped in this powerful magnetic field anyway, and then you've got to move them out. That's how you transport them. so it's not simple yeah it's not simple at all so as we said antimatter when it meets its counterpart annihilates and there are i don't i don't know the number but there is a lot of matter around us all the time so you have to separate it and that requires unbelievably sparse vacuums like sparser than interstellar space it requires really strong and precise magnetic field to trap it in place and make sure it doesn't wander and hit the sides of the the vacuum container because if it does it's just gone exactly yeah you just lose it so you need to kind of uh hold it suspended there and the magnets required to make those magnetic fields need to be kept at extremely cool temperatures around temperature of liquid helium how do you know it's even there well they actually when i visited the experiment they have this small um monitor on the side that tracks the exact frequency the antiproton is oscillating at so you can actually point at this screen and say that's proof of life basically if that if that goes the empty protons are dead but as long as that little signal's there we know it exists wow amazing k-pop demon hunter saja boys breakfast meal and huntrix meal have just dropped at mcdonald's they're calling this a battle for the fans what do you say to that roomie it's not a battle so glad the saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day it is an honor to share no it's our honor it is our larger honor no really stop you can really feel the respect in this battle pick a meal to pick a side participate in mcdonald's while supplies last so this project has actually been the works for almost a decade and the scientists at cern started this in 2018 and a lot of that time has been involved building a device that can hold the antiprotons there unconnected to the grid so all of those difficult things i was saying earlier like the vacuum and the magnetic fields requires a lot of power and it's non-trivial to then transport that on a truck without access to lots of electricity so they've built things like using a 30 litre tank of liquid helium that can just stay cool for a 20 minute ride or electronics that can run on a diesel generator for the test they actually used battery power and the magnet itself has to be engineered to cope with stop start acceleration so if the truck's coming to traffic lights to be able to not be disturbed when it decelerate um and the end result which is what i saw last week is this filing cabinet size box okay um and it weighs a few hundred kilos less than a typical car like a ford focus and inside is all that amazing technology that i was speaking about earlier and then that has to be lifted onto the back of a truck there's this enormous crane inside the antimatter factory that moves across the top and it can support multiple tons i think kind of up to 10 20 tons um and it lifts the antiprotons across the factory, across everyone's head, we're wearing these hard hats, and then just deposits it on the back of the truck.

9:55All of that for, what did we say, 92 pieces of antimatter? I'm really empathising with the driver, having to worry about slowing down at the traffic lights. Yeah, they'd surely wave them through, right? Yeah, these aren't specialist drivers. They've had training, probably to transport other instruments around CERN that they have to make sure they don't brake by braking too hard. and the things they're transporting often cost millions or billions of pounds. Well, so let's get into the price of it, actually, because this is something that's always tickled me about antimatter. So in 1999, OK, that is really old, but this is a figure that NASA gave for producing antimatter, $62.5 trillion per gram of antihydrogens to produce.

10:45you know and even if it's not that much these days it's still by far the most valuable substance in the world well is that the same thing is the most expensive to make it's the most expensive to make therefore it's the most valuable maybe um you know but all the effort yes Alex has been telling us to go into it so I don't know how much it costs we can put a dollar a euro figure on a Swiss francs figure on those 92 anti-prose it's very difficult I was speaking with one of the scientists who worked on another experiment there called Jeffrey Hankston he works on making anti-hydrogen atoms and I asked him about this this idea that it's the most valuable substance on earth and he said well actually it's it's very difficult to to say that because you have all of this custom bespoke equipment around and how can you really put a price on science like that and how can you compare it to other particles that we might make and I think it's definitely up there if you had to make a short list of the most expensive matter on earth it would probably be in the top 10.

11:43And it's very fun to talk about you know if it knocks against the side of the container it'll annihilate but um this isn't actually dangerous is it it's not gonna go loose and destroy the universe what we're actually talking about is it just kind of collides and ceases to exist yeah it would because we're talking about 92 antiprotons here it would barely be registered if it did meet protons so um as we've said uh looking at antimatter it you know it helps us probed some of those most fundamental questions of physics are there other uses i've got sci-fi use i'm sure you do well so antimatter has an energy per unit mass far more than chemical fuel so there's this idea that you can use it as fuel if you had enough of it and i think probably that's what's used in not star trek because that's a different i don't know what's used but like Antimatter in sci-fi is used as a fuel, but that could be a way of using it.

12:43Because here's some figures. The reaction of if you had a kilogram of antimatter. Very expensive, as we now know. Well, let's get to that in a minute. But if you had a kilogram and you combine that with a kilogram of normal matter, it would produce 1.8 times 10 to the 17 joules. that's 180 petajoules of energy and which is about 43 megatons of tnt in one kilo of course how are you going to get it where you're going to get the kilogram um and but the other thing that i and this i'm sorry to just go off into madness but um there has been talk hasn't there about antimatter comets and asteroids and so there has been some idea of like well if we found one you could just go and mine that mine the antimatter asteroid and then you can get nice big lumps of it with your antimatter well you need yeah you need to have a magnet magnetic scoop or something and then you could have that um use that stuff there but obviously they don't exist they're hypothetical that is a question i didn't put to the certain scientists but on my next visit i will you'll never be invited back and you're asking stuff um so dragging us back to reality um glorious reality of the antimatter truck delivery service when might this delivery service be up and running you know going beyond cern and taking the antimatter elsewhere antimatter delivery so there are a few moving parts in this whole eventual delivery antimatter delivery service one is that a facility that is magnetically quiet to test it needs to be built and one such facility is currently under construction in germany in dusseldorf but then also cern will be shutting down soon to upgrade the Large Hadron Collider and some experiments might still be running on a kind of skeleton staff but basically the whole place is shutting down for at least two years until late 2028 is the kind of scheduled date when the power will be upgraded.

14:34So we might have to wait at least two years and currently the first kind of venture outside of CERN isn't scheduled. So CERN have done really well with this story of getting out there and it is just a delightful story seeing the pictures of the antimatter trucks and everything but it does feel like it's the first big news I've heard from CERN for a while obviously the biggest hit was the Higgs boson in 2012 but things did slow down a lot after then you know what what's going on so when I was at CERN I actually had time to sit down with the new director general Mark Thompson he's a British particle physicist and he's just began his five-year term in charge and I basically put that question to him.

15:15I said, what will happen at CERN in the next five, 10 years? Do we even need a big particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider? And here he is on that question. There are these really, really big questions out there. And we know what we don't know, or we know what we don't understand. Big questions like dark matter. Is the Higgs boson a fundamental particle? We actually don't know that. Does the Higgs boson interact with the dark matter. We know it's there. We don't know the answer to that question. Why does the Higgs boson have the properties that it does? Is the Higgs boson on its own or are there multiple Higgs bosons?

15:52We know there are all these questions out there we don't know the answers to. And any time I write, I mean I do this occasionally, I write down my 10 big questions in particle physics, half of them have something to do with the Higgs boson. And the only way you can really start to address those questions is to make what we're calling a Higgs factory, produce many Higgs bosons in very, very clean environments. So we can then look at the properties of the Higgs boson. Is it like we expect it to be? And if we see deviations from the properties we expect, we might then learn, or we will then learn something about the unknown universe.

16:33So we're kind of trying to use the Higgs as a tool to look into the unknown universe. And the only way you can do that is with high energy colliders. There's no other way you can actually look at that. I'm kind of with him on that. Yeah. Yeah, I would have been surprised if he'd turned around to me and said, we don't need this, given that he's just started in the job. Yeah, fair enough. He did seem generally sincere as well. I mean, obviously, he's worked his whole career on particle physics. He knows how this technology works as a scientist. and also it may seem a truism to say but with science you just don't know until you test these things and the kind of energies that the large hadron collider will be testing at you can't test any other facility on earth there are many other cheaper tests that we can do and you can test for things like dark matter particles using tabletop experiments but really there's nothing quite like the LHC and as Thompson also pointed out to me there are certain technologies that were invented as part of the functioning of CERN that have led to enormous changes, most notably the internet.

17:31The World Wide Web was originally started as a messaging protocol at CERN. And obviously now everyone at home listening, we wouldn't be here without that technology. Fantastic. Should we leave it there? Yeah. I mean, that's a great place to end. Thanks, CERN. Thanks, CERN. Thanks, Alex. This is The World, The Universe, and Astronaut News Scientist. I'm Rowan Hooper. And I'm Penny Sarchet. Goodbye. Bye. Bye.

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