Antimatter Joyride
March 25, 2026
Alex KiersteinAn unimaginably small amount of the most expensive and exotic material on earth takes a spin in a Volvo truck—thankfully without annihilating anything.
Antimatter exists, but in quantities so tiny it is almost incomprehensible. It is extremely difficult to store, as it will annihilate itself when it comes into contact with matter. Producing it and storing it requires a vast amount of energy; again, the quantities produced are beyond minuscule and the amount that is actually captured to be stored is even more minute. Only one place on earth makes it: the Antimatter Factory at CERN. And they just put some of it in a truck and drove it around, for science.
Before going into some of the more absurd aspects of antimatter production, storage, and transportation, here’s why it was on a truck: the particle accelerators at CERN produce effects that make it difficult to precisely study antimatter. CERN needed a way to move the antimatter to another location—something that had never been done, because the containment of antimatter is so difficult—and so devised a transportable antimatter containment unit. It was hoisted into a Volvo commercial truck and driven around, to verify the procedure worked, and that none of the antiprotons would be annihilated in transit.
Before you picture the possibility of a mushroom cloud appearing over CERN, signaling the sort of explosive disaster that the science fiction version of this experiment would yield, the quantity transported was so infinitesimally small that I’m running out of adjectives to describe it.
It was 92 individual antiprotons.
There are 50 protons in a molecule of calcium carbonate, which is a common material for a grain of sand. And there are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a grain of sand. So, we’re talking about a staggeringly small quantity.
It’s also a staggeringly expensive material. It takes a lot of energy to make and store antimatter on the individual particle basis. To make a gram of the stuff would take CERN’s Antimatter Factory 10 billion years. TEN BILLION YEARS. The resulting material would have the energy equivalent of 40 kilotons of TNT, about the yield of a W33-Y2 gun-type nuclear fission warhead.
That’s why a gram of antimatter is valued at $5.79 quadrillion dollars. Not that it really matters, because at this rate of production, only about three-quarters of a gram of antimatter would be in existence before the earth would be swallowed by an expanding sun entering its red giant phase. (Actually, production would stop well before that, before the oceans get boiled away, and before life on earth retreats to the poles to escape broiling temperatures and intense UV radiation.)
Returning to a happier subject, this experiment did not put the earth in peril. Per CERN, if containment failed and all of the 92 antiprotons were annihilated, it’d produce 2.7 x 10-6 kWh of energy. It’d take more than 10,000 of these explosions to equal the force of clicking one keyboard key. CERN is safe.
In any event, containment didn’t fail. No antiprotons were lost. The experiment was a success. That was thanks in part to the BASE-STEP containment unit. It’s a transportable Penning trap. A Penning trap uses powerful magnetic fields to trap particles, which then orbit around in the center thanks to the Lorentz force, which compels the particle to move perpendicular to the repelling magnetic force.
The BASE-STEP apparatus uses a supercooled superconducting magnet, so it requires a liquid helium supply. The antimatter must be kept in a vacuum, too, so you need that equipment. For a short joyride, like the one that happened a few days ago, the existing BASE-STEP unit is fine, but to reach the laboratory that can conduct the highly precise experiments on the antimatter would take about 8 hours. So eventually CERN will have to rig up some sort of generator or battery to power a cryocooler, to provide the extreme cooling needed to keep BASE-STEP operational for the journey.
But then, once that phase of the BASE-STEP containment solution is implemented, antimatter will get to take a real road trip.
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