There is a lot of material around, which guarantees that any antimatter Product has a very short lifespan. The study of the antimatter was therefore extremely difficult. But that has changed a little in recent years, because the CERN has set up an installation that produces and imprison the antimatter, allowing in-depth studies of its properties, including whole antomes.
Unfortunately, the equipment used to capture antiprotons also produces interference which limit the precision with which measures can be carried out. CERN therefore decided that it might be good to determine how to keep the antimatter away from where it is produced. Since he attacked this problem anyway, the CERN decided to make an expedition container for the Antimatière, which allows him to be put on a truck and potentially taken to laboratories across Europe.
An expedition container for the antimatter
The problem that CERN faces comes from its own equipment. The antimatter it captures is produced by breaking a bundle of particles in a stationary target. Consequently, all the anti-participants that come out of debris have a lot of energy. If you want to keep one of them, you must slow them down, which is done using electromagnetic fields which can act on the charged antimatière particles. Unfortunately, as the team notes behind the new works, many measures that we would like with the antimatter are “extremely sensitive to the noise of an external magnetic field”.
In short, the equipment that slows the antimatter limits the precision of the measurements you can take.
The obvious solution is to keep the antimatter away from where it is produced. But it becomes difficult very quickly. The antimatter containment system must be maintained as an extreme vacuum and needs superconductive materials to produce the electromagnetic fields which prevent the antimatter from banging in the walls of the container. All of this means a significant diet, as well as a liquid helium cache to operate the superconductors. A standard shipping container will simply do not do the trick.
The CERN team therefore built a portable containment device two meters long. At one end is a junction which allows it to be connected to the bundle of particles produced by the existing installation. This junction leads to the containment area, which is covered by a superconductive magnet. Elsewhere on the device are batteries to ensure an uninterrupted power supply, as well as electronics to execute everything. The whole configuration is enclosed in a metal frame which includes lifting points which can be used to fix it to a crane to move.
