A truck transports antiprotons in a successful test of the world’s first antimatter transport system on the Cern campus in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland on March 24, 2026 (AFP / Fabrice COFFRINI).
Scientists at Cern achieved an unprecedented feat on Tuesday: transporting antiprotons by road, a crucial step towards delivering antimatter to other laboratories in Europe.
“The particles came back… so it is a success,” said Cern physicist Stefan Ulmer, as a truck returned after traveling 10 kilometers on the campus of the main European physics laboratory.
Mr. Ulmer, spokesperson for Cern’s “Base” experiment studying the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe, said this marked the “beginning of a new era.”
Visible matter and its mysterious twin, antimatter, are considered almost identical, except for their charge and inverted magnetic properties.
Scientists are still puzzled by why our universe contains much more matter than antimatter, even though the Big Bang theoretically should have created equal amounts of both.
When antimatter comes into contact with matter, it annihilates, disappearing in a burst of energetic particles. Moving antimatter particles poses a colossal challenge, now successfully overcome.
“It’s great, it opens up a lot of perspectives,” exclaimed Francois Butin, technical coordinator of Cern’s antimatter factory, the only facility in the world where antiprotons can be produced, stored, and studied.
The accelerator and particle decelerator of the antimatter factory generate fluctuations in the magnetic field that affect antiproton measurements on site.
A portable cryogenic device, filled with a cloud of 92 antiprotons, is transferred onto a truck in a successful test of the world’s first antimatter transport system by road on the Cern campus in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland on March 24, 2026 (AFP / Fabrice COFFRINI).
To address this problem, scientists found a way to capture antiprotons in a special ion trap, to transfer them to other more stable facilities where they can be studied with extreme precision.
“We are seeking to understand the fundamental symmetries of nature, and we know that by conducting these experiments outside this accelerator, we can obtain measurements 100 to 1,000 times more precise,” explained Mr. Ulmer.
“A True Success”
For this world’s first attempt at transporting antimatter, a cloud of 92 antiprotons was captured and stored in a transportable cryogenic trap.
The device includes a superconducting magnet, a cryogenic cooling system using liquid helium – to cool the antiprotons to 8.2 kelvins (-268 degrees Celsius) to slow their speed – energy sources, and a vacuum chamber trapping the antiparticles using magnetic and electric fields.
Dozens of Cern scientists, wearing helmets, assisted in delicately lifting the object resembling a large cabinet containing the 850-kilogram trap using a giant overhead crane, which was then loaded onto a flatbed truck.
“The most critical part is on the road because the vibrations are more pronounced,” said Marcus Jankowski, AFP, head of safety at Cern’s experimental physics department.
The truck, with “Antimatter in Motion” written on its sides, slowly crossed the Cern campus, with Mr. Ulmer following in a car, eyes fixed on his phone displaying the vital signs of antimatter, specifically the characteristic frequency of antiproton vibrations, taking the form of an M with two peaks.
The height of the peaks indicates the number of trapped antiprotons, he explained, noting that if the frequency reduces to a single peak, it indicates the antiprotons have annihilated.
A portable cryogenic device, filled with a cloud of 92 antiprotons, is transferred onto a truck in a successful test of the world’s first antimatter transport system by road on the Cern campus in Meyrin, near Geneva, Switzerland on March 24, 2026 (AFP / Fabrice COFFRINI).
During transport, there was a slight modification in the signal, but Mr. Ulmer later indicated that it was the detector’s resonance frequency that had varied by a few hertz due to the truck’s vibration.
“The particles are still in the same position… It is a true success,” he celebrated afterwards.
In the long term, CERN plans to send antiprotons to different laboratories in Europe, starting with its precision laboratory in Düsseldorf, an eight-hour drive away.
The biggest challenge will be transferring the antiprotons once the antimatter reaches its destination without them disappearing. Tests continue, according to Cern officials.
