In a First, the World’s Most Expensive and Volatile Substance—Antimatter—Traveled by Truck

The work paves the way for longer-distance transport of the rare material so scientists can study it at other facilities

Kunjal Bastola | Editorial Intern

March 26, 2026

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An odd substance took a short field trip near Geneva, Switzerland, on March 24. Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) successfully transported antimatter about five miles in a truck, marking the first time this highly volatile and expensive material has been transported.

“It is something humanity has never done before; it is historic,” says Stefan Ulmer, a physicist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) in Germany, who works on the project, to Nature’s Elizabeth Gibney. “We bought a lot of champagne, and we invited the entire antimatter community to celebrate with us” that day.

Antimatter particles are the counterparts of ordinary matter particles. For example, a standard positively charged proton—a component of atoms that make up humans and the objects we interact with—has a negatively charged antimatter equivalent called an antiproton. If these two opposite types of particles meet, they annihilate each other and release energy.

Scientists want to study the strange stuff because laws of physics suggest that the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago, should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But that means they should have blasted one another away, leaving an empty universe. Therefore, some mysterious factors must have led to more matter than antimatter in the cosmos.

CERN’s “antimatter factory” is the only facility making and storing usable amounts of antiprotons, so it’s currently the sole place where the substance can be studied. Producing merely one gram of antimatter would cost trillions of dollars, and that quantity’s annihilation would release the energy of a nuclear bomb. It would take CERN ten times the age of the universe to generate that much, Ulmer tells Nature.

Still, other facilities have different tools that could be used to examine the rare material. For instance, HHU—located roughly 350 miles from CERN—has instruments that can perform high-precision measurements not possible at the institute near Geneva.

So scientists built a special box to hold antiparticles that ensures they can’t interact with the outside world, or even with the device’s interior. It suspends the volatile substance via electromagnetic fields generated by a powerful magnet system cooled to around -450 degrees Fahrenheit and traps the antiparticles in a vacuum chamber. The entire device weighs roughly 2,200 pounds. CERN researchers successfully tested the transportation of ordinary protons with it in 2024.

This time, they took it for a spin with antimatter: 92 antiprotons.

Experts used a crane to carefully move the box of precious cargo from a lab onto a truck, which took about three hours, per the Associated Press’ Jamey Keaten. Then, they drove the vehicle for roughly 30 minutes around CERN’s campus, and subsequently returned the antiprotons to the lab. They worked with so little antimatter that even if it did touch ordinary matter and annihilate, it would release a small amount of energy detectable only by a special instrument, reports the AP.

While the demonstration showed that antimatter can be transported by truck, the device still has a long way to go.

“To reach our first destination—our dedicated precision laboratory at HHU in Germany—would take us at least eight hours,” says Christian Smorra, an HHU physicist who works on the project, in a statement. That would require a generator to keep the magnet system cool for that long, which the team is investigating, he adds.

Nevertheless, “this is a starting point of a really exciting journey,” Ulmer said during a news conference, reports Science News’ Emily Conover.

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Kunjal Bastola is an editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.