Antimatter: coming soon to a lab near you?

Scientists spend a lot of time ordering things: laboratory equipment, samples and consumables. What if a researcher’s to-do list included ordering an antimatter delivery? In March, the BASE Collaboration brought that reality one step closer. Writing in Nature, Leonhardt et al. sealed 92 antiprotons in a specialized ultrahigh-vacuum trap, loaded them into a truck and drove them out of the Antimatter Factory (AMF) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland1. The antiprotons did not go very far, just on a 7.5-kilometre joyride through the lab grounds. But if antimatter can survive a few kilometres on the campus roads, it could, in principle, be delivered to research facilities much farther afield.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02647-6

References Leonhardt, M. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-11019-z (2026). Tseng, C. H. & Gabrielse, G. Hyperfine Interact. 76, 381–386 (1993). Van der Meer, S. Rev. Mod. Phys. 57, 689–697 (1985). Bell, M. et al. Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res. 190, 237–255 (1981). Aumann, T. et al. Eur. Phys. J. A 58, 88 (2022). Leonhardt, M. et al. Nature 641, 871–875 (2025). Caravita, R. Progress report of the AEgIS experiment 2025 Report No. CERN-SPSC-2026-004, SPSC-SR-374 (CERN, 2026). Download references

Competing Interests The authors are colleagues of the BASE collaboration as a fellow scientists working at the CERN AD/ELENA facility, and thus interact with them regarding facility resources and long-term facility strategy.

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