Antimatter is about to go on its first road trip.
Until now, the list of things that travel in vans has pretty much included indie bands, plumbers and undercover surveillance teams. But, according to a report published online in the journal Nature today (Feb. 21), physicists are getting ready to pack up a cloud of billions of antiprotons for the journey of a “few hundred meters” between the physics lab CERN’s antimatter factory and the site of an experiment designed to figure out the shapes of bulky, radioactive atoms.
Antiprotons are rare but hugely important particles. Every matter particle has an antimatter twin, like the Jekyll to its Hyde, with exactly reversed physical properties. And antiprotons are the bizarro versions of protons, the positively charged particles at the center of atoms. When they collide with protons, they annihilate each other.
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