A small amount of antimatter took to the road on Tuesday, representing the first time any quantity of the world’s most expensive, volatile and rare substance has been moved. The breakthrough opens the door to new possibilities for the study of the elusive material.Antimatter is the mirror image of regular matter — it has an opposite electric charge and reversed subatomic properties. When matter and antimatter come into contact, they annihilate each other and disappear in a flash of energy. As a result, antimatter is at the core of one of the universe’s greatest mysteries: The big bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, leading to either a universe with no matter left at all due to total annihilation, or a universe with equal amounts of both.The universe, however, consists of matter but almost no antimatter, which exists naturally only in small quantities, created by radioactive decay and cosmic ray collisions. Physicists call this problem the matter-antimatter asymmetry. The current theory is that matter was created slightly in excess compared with antimatter — just one extra matter particle per roughly 1 billion antimatter particles — although the reason is unknown.AdvertisementAdvertisementStudying antimatter can help scientists understand the nature of this asymmetry, but doing so isn’t easy. The instruments used to make antimatter create interference that hinders its study. Transporting antimatter away from this interference would allow scientists to take measurements of the substance more accurately.The research team kept the antimatter stable with a powerful vacuum and magnets operated at minus 470 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 268 degrees Celsius). – CERN“You need to think of these measurements as being, in some sense, similar to microscopy,” said Stefan Ulmer, a physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN. The antimatter transport took place at CERN’s facilities near Geneva, the site of the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.“The facility in which we are operating is producing fluctuations …
