CERN to truck antiprotons around campus in first-of-its-kind test
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- CERN's STEP project will load around 100 antiprotons into an 850-kilogram trap, hoist it by crane onto a truck, and drive a 4-kilometre loop around the CERN campus — the first demonstration of road transport for trapped antimatter.
- Project leader Christian Smorra and his team designed STEP to use a 30-litre liquid-helium tank to keep superconducting magnets cold, with the test truck running on battery power (and a simple diesel generator as a fallback).
- The Antimatter Decelerator hall at CERN remains the only facility in the world that can produce millions of antiprotons on demand and store them; experiments there have been battling magnetic-field noise that limits measurement precision.
- In 2024, Smorra's team proved the transport concept by driving the trap with regular protons around the CERN campus; the upcoming run is the first attempt with actual antiprotons, which have been held in the trap for about a week awaiting the trip.
- Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf is building a receiving facility in a near-zero-magnetic-field environment that STEP could one day supply, though CERN's planned Large Hadron Collider shutdown from July through late 2028 will delay the rollout.
- Smorra dismisses public safety concerns, noting that 1,000 lost antiprotons would be physically imperceptible: 'If you transport 1000 antiprotons and it gets lost, you won't even notice it.'
Why it matters: STEP is the missing link between CERN's antimatter factory and the ultra-quiet labs needed to test why the universe is made of matter instead of antimatter — by physically trucking antiprotons out of the noisy decelerator hall, Smorra's team unlocks precision measurements that were previously impossible. The 4-km test is a proof of concept for a continent-wide delivery service to places like Düsseldorf, but CERN's LHC upgrade running through late 2028 pushes real cross-border deliveries years out.
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