Antimatter factory celebrates first truckload of world's most expensive material

Inside this truck is the most expensive material in the universe, costing approximately $62 trillion

per gram. This is the first time it's ever been transported like this, and being able to move it

around might help scientists unravel some of the biggest mysteries about the origins of the universe

Transporting this material is no simple task. If a single particle of the antimatter inside this

truck makes contact with one of the protons surrounding it, they would annihilate one another

turning all of their mass into energy. That means kaboom. Matter-Anti-Matter Annihilation has long been the stuff of science fiction

with anti-matter engines powering the adventures of Star Trek's Starship Enterprise and anti-matter based weaponry featured in stories like Angels and Demons and the Halo franchise

Matter and anti-matter react so explosively together because they're like exact opposites

of one another. To briefly explain, I've brought Anti-Jesse. Can we get some kind of barrier here

so we don't annihilate each other? Thanks. On Team Regular Matter, we've got

positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. On Team Anti-Matter, we've got

negatively charged anti-protons and positively charged anti-electrons, called positrons There also neutrons and anti Some people have said there may be entire antimatter planets and antimatter stars So what different about you Anti I not sure

Do you have these freckles? Stop! What are you doing? Ah! Are the fears of weaponizing this material valid or overblown

What is the purpose of shipping it like this? And what cosmic mysteries might be solved because of it

The answer to my questions lay with this man, Dr. Stefan Ulmer. It is true that if you accumulate half a gram of antiprotons and you annihilate them at once

I mean, this has the destructive power of an atomic bomb. But to accumulate half a gram, given the current accelerator technology

you need to accumulate for 75 billion years. When you're working with antimatter, a certain amount of annihilation comes with the territory

In fact, Ulmer told me he sees it all the time. Here's what it looks like to scientists when matter and antimatter meet

Ulmer's team at CERN is not measuring their antimatter in grams, which could cause a catastrophe if it annihilated all at once

They are measuring them in individual antiprotons. Nearly 100 of those antiprotons were in the truck that made the historic trip around CERN's facility

In this antimatter transport you know like the most dangerous thing is still like the fuel in the tank of the truck The team does still have to take precautions to avoid losing these precious antiprotons in transit So they put them in something called a penning trap which suspends them in a vacuum and traps them with magnets

Ulmer told me it's the best vacuum that's ever been measured. Antimatter not annihilating is a pressure gauge

That's awesome. That's probably the most expensive pressure gauge ever. It's also the most precise one

The astronomical cost of antimatter comes from the large amount of resources required to make and capture very small quantities

CERN does this by smashing very fast protons traveling near the speed of light into a piece of iridium metal, creating antiprotons, among some other things

But the same thing that makes CERN the ultimate antimatter factory also is what makes it difficult to study antimatter on site

The accelerator running creates very strong background magnetic field fluctuations. And these background magnetic field fluctuations talk to the particles in the panning traps

and this leads to these blurry pictures. Scientists can't unravel the mysteries of the universe by looking at blurry pictures

That's why antimatter needs to be brought off-site, where it can be studied without interference to get a clearer picture of what's going on

This will hopefully lead to answers about why there seems to be so much more matter than antimatter in the universe information which may help us better understand the origins of the universe itself Antimatter looks kind of similar to matter right

It's the perfect mirror image. The mass of the antiproton is to 11 significant digits

The magnetic moment of the antiproton is to 9 significant digits. There must be some asymmetry somewhere

At least this is my reading. So maybe we find it in the next order of magnitude

This hunt for this new physics that makes you creative. And we are doing this to better understand basically the fundamental physics of the universe

We will never stop unless either we have found something or we have convinced ourselves that we have reached limits in measurement accuracy that we cannot overcome anymore

Now, this may sound like a lot of extra work just to get measurements of antiparticles that are a few orders of magnitude more precise

But Ulmer told me that it's in the hunt for greater precision that major discoveries may

be waiting for us. That's totally exciting, you know, that you can do this and that this is then immediately

related basically to some very big fundamental questions. I mean, it's like heaven

What's your version of heaven? Let us know down in the comments and subscribe for more stories that make you say, what the future