antimatter

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Hackaday Links: March 29, 2026

March 29, 2026 by 8 Comments

Whether it’s a new couch or a rare piece of hardware picked up on eBay, we all know what it feels like to eagerly await a delivery truck. But the CERN researchers involved in a delivery earlier this week weren’t transporting anyone’s Amazon Prime packages, they were hauling antimatter.

Moving antimatter, specifically antiprotons, via trucks might seem a bit ridiculous. But ultimately CERN wants to transfer samples between various European laboratories, and that means they need a practical and reliable way of getting the temperamental stuff from point A to B. To demonstrate this capability, the researchers loaded a truck with 92 antiprotons and drove it around for 30 minutes. Of course, you can’t just put antiprotons in a cardboard box, the experiment utilized a cryogenically cooled magnetic containment unit that they hope will eventually be able to keep antimatter from rudely annihilating itself on trips lasting as long as 8 hours.

Speaking of deliveries, anyone building a new computer should be careful when ordering components. Shady companies are looking to capitalize on the currently sky high prices of solid-state drives by counterfeiting popular models, and according to the Japanese site AKIBA PC Hotline, there are some examples in the wild that would fool  all but the most advanced users. They examine a bootleg drive that’s a nearly identical replica of the Samsung 990 PRO —  the unit and its packaging are basically a mirror image of the real deal, the stated capacity appears valid, and it even exhibits similar performance when put through a basic benchmark test.

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Boosting Antihydrogen Production Using Beryllium Ions

November 25, 2025 by 27 Comments

Antihydrogen forms an ideal study subject for deciphering the secrets of fundamental physics due to it being the most simple anti-matter atom. However, keeping it from casually annihilating itself along with some matter hasn’t gotten much easier since it was first produced in 1995. Recently ALPHA researchers at CERN’s Antimatter Factory announced that they managed to produce and trap no fewer than 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in less than seven hours using a new beryllium-enhanced trap. This is an eight-fold increase compared to previous methods.

To produce an antihydrogen atom from a positron and an antiproton, the components and resulting atoms can not simply be trapped in an electromagnetic field, but requires that they are cooled to the point where they’re effectively stationary. This also makes adding more than one of such atom to a trap into a tedious process since the first successful capture in 2017.

In the open access paper in Nature Communications by [R. Akbari] et al. the process is described, starting with the merging of anti-protons from the CERN Antiproton Decelerator with positrons sourced from the radioactive decay of sodium-22 (β+ decay). The typical Penning-Malmberg trap is used, but laser-cooled beryllium ions (Be+) are added to provide sympathetic cooling during the synthesis step.

Together with an increased availability of positrons, the eight-fold increase in antihydrogen production was thus achieved. The researchers speculate that the sympathetic cooling is more efficient at keeping a constant temperature than alternative cooling methods, which allows for the increased rate of production.

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Hackaday Links: October 8, 2023

October 8, 2023 by 17 Comments

Too much of a good thing is generally a bad thing, but a surfeit of asteroid material is probably a valid exception to that rule. Such was NASA’s plight as it started to unpack the sample return capsule recently dropped off by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it flew by Earth, only to discover it was packed to overflowing with samples of asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft, which arrived at Bennu in 2018 and spent a good long time mapping the near-Earth asteroid, apparently approached its carefully selected landing site a bit too energetically and really packed the sample container full of BennuBits™ — so much so that they could actually see sample shedding off into space before stowing it for the long trip back to Earth. The container is now safely in the hands of the sample analysis team, who noted that everything in the TAGSAM (Touch and Go Sample Acquisition Module), even the avionics deck, is covered with black particles, each precious one of which needs to be collected and cataloged. The black stuff is especially interesting to planetary scientists, as it might be exactly what they were after when they selected Bennu, which may have broken off a much larger carbon-rich asteroid a billion or so years ago. It’ll be interesting to see if these interplanetary hitchhikers have anything to tell us about the origin of life in the solar system.

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