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Today, in a world first, a team of scientists from the BASE experiment at CERN successfully transported a trap filled with antiprotons in a truck across the Laboratory’s main site. The team managed to accumulate a cloud of 92 antiprotons in an innovative portable cryogenic Penning trap, then disconnect it from the experimental facility, load it onto a truck and continue experiment operation after transport. This is a remarkable achievement, given that antimatter is very difficult to preserve, as it annihilates upon contact with matter. This world premiere is a test, the ultimate aim being to transport antiprotons to other European laboratories, such as Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), where very-high-precision measurements of the antiproton properties could be performed.
Antimatter is a naturally occurring class of particles that is almost identical to ordinary matter except that the electric charge and magnetic moment are reversed. According to the laws of physics, the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. These equal-but-opposite particles would have quickly annihilated each other, leaving an empty Universe. However, our Universe contains predominantly matter, and this imbalance has baffled scientists for decades. Physicists suspect that there are hidden differences that may explain why matter survived and antimatter all but disappeared.
To deepen our understanding of antimatter, the BASE collaboration aims to precisely measure the properties of antiprotons, such as their intrinsic magnetic moment, and then compare these measurements with those taken with protons. But they now face a problem: “The machines and equipment in CERN’s ‘antimatter factory’, where BASE is located, generate magnetic field fluctuations that limit how far we can push our precision measurements,” explains Stefan Ulmer, Spokesperson of BASE. These fluctuations are minuscule, of the order of one billionth of a tesla, 20 000 times smaller than the magnetic field of the earth, and undetectable outside the building. “However, the precision of the measurements taken in BASE is such that gaining an even deeper understanding of the fundamental properties of antiprotons will require moving the experiment out of the building.”, says Stefan Ulmer.
CERN’s “antimatter factory” is the only place in the world where antiprotons can be produced, stored and studied. Two successive decelerators, the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) and the Extra Low Energy Antiproton ring (ELENA), provide several experiments with low-energy antiprotons – the lower their energy, the easier they can be stored and studied. Among these experiments, BASE holds long-standing records for containing antiprotons for more than one year, and the experiment has invented this pioneering approach in order to move on to the next stage: transporting antiprotons to an offline space for more precise experiments as well as sharing them with others. That’s why they developed the BASE-STEP trap: an apparatus designed to store and transport antiprotons.
“Our aim with BASE-STEP is to be able to trap antiprotons and deliver them to our precision laboratories at a dedicated space at CERN, HHU, Leibnitz University Hannover and perhaps other laboratories that are capable of performing very-high-precision antiproton measurements, which unfortunately is not possible in the antimatter factory,” explains Christian Smorra, the Leader of BASE-STEP. “We validated the feasibility of the project with protons last year, but what we achieved today with antiprotons is a huge leap forward towards our objective.”
BASE-STEP is small enough to be loaded onto a truck and fit through ordinary laboratory doors, and it can withstand the bumps and vibrations of transport. The current apparatus – which includes a superconducting magnet, liquid helium cryogenic cooling, power reserves and a vacuum chamber that traps the antiparticles using magnetic and electric fields – weighs 1000 kilograms: much more compact than BASE or any other existing system used to study antimatter.
“To reach our first destination – our dedicated precision laboratory at HHU in Germany – would take us at least 8 hours,” says Christian Smorra. “This means we’d have to keep the trap’s superconducting magnet at a temperature below 8.2 K for that long. So, in addition to the liquid helium , we’d need to have a generator to power a cryocooler on the truck. We are currently investigating this possibility.” Nevertheless, the greatest challenge remains on arrival at the destination: to transfer the antiprotons to the experiment without them vanishing.
“Transporting antimatter is a pioneering and ambitious project, and I congratulate the BASE collaboration on this impressive milestone. We are at the beginning of an exciting scientific journey that will allow us to further deepen our understanding of antimatter,” says CERN Director for Research and Computing, Gautier Hamel de Monchenault.
Further information:
The media kit about the Antimatter transport is available here.
alazuka Mon, 03/23/2026 - 18:50 Publication Date Tue, 03/24/2026 - 14:00
From physics analysis and detector operations to software development and upgrade work, ATLAS PhD students make critical contributions to the Collaboration’s scientific mission while completing their degrees. This year’s ATLAS Thesis Awards drew from more than 200 eligible theses, reflecting both the scale of the Collaboration and the breadth of student research. From this pool, the Thesis Awards Committee reviewed 36 formal applications before selecting eight winners.
This year’s recipients are: Takumi Aoki from the University of Tokyo (Japan), Kartik Deepak Bhide from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Germany), Antonio Jesús Gómez Delegido from Universitat de València (Spain), Simon Florian Koch from the University of Oxford (UK), Elena Mazzeo from Università degli studi di Milano (Italy), Ryan Roberts from the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (USA), Stephen Nicholas Swatman from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Elliot Watton from the University of Glasgow and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK).
“Students are the ‘soul’ of the ATLAS Collaboration,” said Jean‑François Arguin, ATLAS Thesis Awards Committee Chair. “They make up a third of ATLAS scientific authors and carry out much of the essential work that keeps ATLAS at the frontiers of scientific research. The quality and breadth of this year’s nominations made the Committee’s decision especially challenging, and we congratulate all nominees for their outstanding work.”
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Read more on the ATLAS website.
anschaef Wed, 03/11/2026 - 12:19 Byline ATLAS collaboration Publication Date Wed, 03/11/2026 - 12:17
With more than 6000 scientists, engineers, technicians, administrators and students, CMS is one of the world’s largest scientific collaborations. From 1 January 2026 to 31 August 2028, Anadi Canepa has the important role of representing the Collaboration as its Spokesperson. Joining her as deputies are Hafeez Hoorani, who continues in his present role until 31 August 2026, and the newly appointed Florencia Canelli, who will remain in office until 31 August 2028.
Previous Spokesperson Gautier Hamel de Monchenault left the role early, at the end of 2025 instead of in August 2026, to become CERN’s Director for Research and Computing. The Collaboration thanks him for his work on its behalf and wishes him all the best going forward.
Anadi Canepa is a senior scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). She began her research with the CDF experiment at the Tevatron, focusing on searches for new phenomena and the Higgs boson and contributing to upgrades of the silicon tracker and trigger system (PhD, Purdue University, 2006). In 2015, she became a scientist at Fermilab and joined the CMS Collaboration. She was appointed CMS Deputy Spokesperson during Gautier Hamel de Monchenault’s term of office (2024–2025).
Hafeez Hoorani received his PhD in Experimental High-Energy Physics from the DPNC, University of Geneva, in 1996. He was part of the L3 experiment at LEP, where he was responsible for the level 1 charge particle trigger. He joined CMS in 1995 and, since then, has contributed to its muon system in various capacities.
Florencia Canelli is Professor of Physics at the University of Zurich. She began her research at the D0 experiment at the Tevatron (PhD, University of Rochester, 2003), where she measured the properties of the top quark. Since joining the University of Zurich and CMS in 2012, she has held several leadership roles within the Collaboration.
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Read more on the CMS website.
anschaef Wed, 02/25/2026 - 11:43 Byline CMS collaboration Publication Date Wed, 02/25/2026 - 11:38In beehives on the CERN site, a buzzing team of bees collaborates to build hexagon after hexagon of honeycomb – a shape that allows the most honey for a given amount of beeswax to be stored. Working nearby, a team of similarly committed scientists has recently pieced together some more high-tech hexagons to form the first prototype “cassette” for the new CMS endcap calorimeters.
These cassettes are the wedge-shaped building blocks of the CMS High-Granularity Calorimeters (HGCALs) which, when complete, will be the largest silicon-based detectors ever built. The two endcaps will be placed on either side of CMS to replace the experiment’s existing endcaps ready for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), which is due to start operating in 2030.
As HGCAL physicist Dimitra Tsionou from National Taiwan University explains, the new calorimeter represents a significant advancement in detection technology. “HGCAL is effectively a 5D calorimeter: it performs 3D spatial reconstruction, energy reconstruction, and has very high timing resolution”.
This technology will allow HGCAL to handle the dramatic increase in the number of particles that the HL-LHC will deliver. As well as helping physicists to observe more rare processes, the higher luminosity provided by the HL-LHC will result in 4 to 5 times more simultaneous particle collisions than occur with the existing LHC. 40 million times each second, 140–200 collisions are expected to occur simultaneously, far more than the existing CMS endcaps are capable of measuring.
In addition, the endcaps will need to withstand the higher levels of radiation to which they will be subjected due to the increased number of collisions. HGCAL will not only handle these much harsher conditions but will also match the energy resolution, improve the particle identification and enhance the triggering performance of the existing endcaps.
HGCAL physicist Dimitra Tsionou placing a hexagonal module on a large copper cooling plate, using a vacuum support tool to avoid physical damage. Each module consists of a hexagonal silicon sensor sandwiched between a high-density copper-tungsten alloy baseplate and a printed circuit board. These modules come from six different module assembly centres: IHEP in Beijing, NTU in Taipei, TIFR in Mumbai, UCSB in Santa Barbara, CMU in Pittsburgh and TTU in Texas. (Image: CERN)When particles collide, other particles are produced, many of which will enter the endcaps to be detected by HGCAL. Although the collisions will be simultaneous, they will occur up to 10 cm away from each other, so the particles they produce will reach the endcaps about ten trillionths of a second apart. HGCAL will measure the timing of each particle – the difference between when it arrives in the detector and the moment of the collision – with the exceptional corresponding level of precision.
For the calorimeter to trace the paths of these particles back to the collision they came from, HGCAL needs to have a high density of sensors, the ‘high granularity’ from which its name derives. Each cassette is covered with sensors that will record the energy, position and timing of the particles passing through the 47 layers of the detector.
CERN will construct the 26 layers closest to the collision point, which will form the electromagnetic section and detect electrons and photons. In parallel, Fermilab will construct the 21 layers furthest from the collision point to form the hadronic section that will measure particles like protons and neutrons. A full endcap will have a total active sensor area of about 500 square metres – almost the size of two tennis courts – and will contain more than 3 million detector channels.
The first 26 layers of each endcap will form the electromagnetic section, made entirely from silicon modules assembled into double-sided cassettes. 6 cassettes are required to form two layers of a complete circle, and all 156 cassettes needed for the full section will be assembled and tested at CERN. These cassettes will then be covered with a steel-clad lead “absorber”, which will produce showers of secondary particles when hit by particles originating in the initial collisions. (Video: Karol Rapacz, CMS)“It’s very ambitious”, explained HGCAL physicist and logistics manager Ludivine Ceard from National Taiwan University. “It's the first time that a detector using this technology will be built on this scale and have to operate in such tough conditions.”
When Fermilab has constructed and tested the hadronic cassettes, they will be shipped to CERN and inserted into steel structures, the first of which was produced in Pakistan and is currently being re-assembled at CERN. An electromagnetic section will then be joined to a hadronic section to form a full HGCAL endcap.
Once both HGCAL sections are complete, the electromagnetic section will be placed on top of the hadronic section to form a full calorimeter. (Video: Karol Rapacz, CMS)“There’s so many challenging aspects”, emphasised Ceard, but she added that these challenges are definitely worth it as far as the team is concerned. “HGCAL is really special, the first of its kind”.
(Video: CMS, CERN)ehatters Thu, 01/29/2026 - 11:15 Byline Emma Hattersley Publication Date Thu, 01/29/2026 - 10:48
ALICE enters the new year with a new management team, ready to steer the collaboration through a key period of detector operation, data analysis and major upgrades. From 1 January 2026 onward, Kai Schweda, senior scientist at the GSI Helmholtz Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, has assumed the role of ALICE spokesperson, succeeding Marco van Leeuwen. Elected by the ALICE Collaboration Board, Kai will lead the collaboration for the next three years. Kai comes to the position after serving as ALICE deputy spokesperson for the last three years. The new management team also includes deputy spokespersons Andrea Dainese, research director at INFN Padova, Italy, and Anthony Robert Timmins, professor at the University of Houston, Texas, USA.
The team will have new challenges ahead of them in terms of efficient Run 3 data taking in 2026, Run 3 data analysis, publication of new results, LS3 activities and, most crucially, upgrading ALICE to the next level: the next-generation ALICE 3 experiment for LHC Run 5.
Read the full article on the ALICE collaboration website.
anschaef Mon, 01/12/2026 - 12:44 Byline ALICE collaboration Publication Date Mon, 01/12/2026 - 12:43
Particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can reach temperatures over one hundred thousand times hotter than at the centre of the Sun. Yet, somehow, light atomic nuclei and their antimatter counterparts emerge from this scorching environment unscathed, even though the bonds holding the nuclei together would normally be expected to break at a much lower temperature. Physicists have puzzled for decades over how this is possible, but now the ALICE collaboration has provided experimental evidence of how it happens, with its results published today in Nature.
Researchers at ALICE studied deuterons (a proton and a neutron bound together) and antideuterons (an antiproton and an antineutron) that were produced in high-energy collisions of protons at the LHC. They found evidence that, rather than emerging directly from the collisions, nearly 90% of the deuterons and antideuterons were created by the nuclear fusion of particles emerging from the collision, with one of their constituent particles coming from the decay of a short-lived particle.
“These results represent a milestone for the field,” said Marco van Leeuwen, spokesperson for the ALICE experiment. “They fill a major gap in our understanding of how nuclei are formed from quarks and gluons and provide essential input for the next generation of theoretical models.”
These findings not only explain a long-standing puzzle in nuclear physics but could have far-reaching implications for astrophysics and cosmology. Light nuclei and antinuclei are also produced in interactions between cosmic rays and the interstellar medium, and they may be created in processes involving the dark matter that pervades the Universe. By building reliable models for the production of light nuclei and antinuclei, physicists can better interpret cosmic-ray data and look for possible dark-matter signals.
The ALICE observation provides a solid experimental foundation for modelling light-nuclei formation in space. It shows that most of the light nuclei observed are not created in a single thermal burst, but rather through a sequence of decays and fusions that occur as the system cools.
The ALICE collaboration came to these conclusions by analysing the deuterons produced from high-energy proton collisions recorded during the second run of the LHC. The researchers measured the momenta of deuterons and pions, which are another type of particle formed of a quark–antiquark pair. They found a correlation between the pion and deuteron momenta, indicating that the pion and either the proton or the neutron of the deuteron actually came from the decay of a short-lived particle.
This short-lived particle, known as the delta resonance, decays in about one trillionth of a trillionth of a second into a pion and a nucleon, i.e. either a proton or a neutron. The nucleon can then fuse with other nearby nucleons to produce light nuclei such as a deuteron. This nuclear fusion happens at a small distance from the main collision point, in a cooler environment, which gives the freshly created nuclei a much better chance of survival. These results were observed for both particles and antiparticles, revealing that the same mechanism governs the formation of deuterons and antideuterons.
“The discovery illustrates the unique capabilities of the ALICE experiment to study the strong nuclear force under extreme conditions,” said Alexander Philipp Kalweit, ALICE physics coordinator.
rodrigug Wed, 12/10/2025 - 09:50 Byline ALICE collaboration Publication Date Wed, 12/10/2025 - 17:10
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