Antimatter is notoriously volatile, but physicists have learned to control it so well that they are now starting to harness it as a tool for the first time. In a project that began last month, researchers will transport antimatter by truck and then use it to study the strange behaviour of rare radioactive nuclei. The work aims to provide a better understanding of fundamental processes inside atomic nuclei and to help astrophysicists learn about the interiors of neutron stars, which contain the densest form of matter in the Universe.
“Antimatter has long been studied for itself, but now it is mastered well enough that people can start to use it as a probe for matter,” says Alexandre Obertelli, a physicist at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, who leads the project, known as PUMA (antiProton Unstable Matter Annihilation), which will take place at CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
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