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Title: CERN Gears Up To Ship Antimatter Across Europe
Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/19/2...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a lot of
matter around, which ensures that any antimatter produced experiences a very
short lifespan. Studying antimatter, therefore, has been extremely difficult.
But that's changed a bit in recent years, as CERN has set up a facility that
produces and traps antimatter, allowing for extensive studies of its
properties, including entire anti-atoms. Unfortunately, the hardware used to
capture antiprotons also produces interference that limits the precision with
which measurements can be made. So CERN decided that it might be good to
determine how to move the antimatter away from where it's produced. Since it
was tackling that problem anyway, CERN decided to make a shipping container
for antimatter, allowing it to be put on a truck and potentially taken to
labs throughout Europe. [...] Overall, the hardware stayed cold, generally at
a bit over 5 Kelvin. The exception was when the system was reconnected to the
antimatter source hardware and the system reconnected to the electrical
system at CERN. While those actions show up as temperature spikes, the
superconducting magnets remained well under 7 Kelvin. An accelerometer was in
place to track the forces experienced by the hardware while the truck was
moving. This showed that 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. Measurements made while the system was in transit suggest
that the whole process occurred losslessly, meaning that not a single proton
escaped during the entire transport. The findings have been published in the
journal Nature.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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