On March 24, 2026, a truck circled the campus of CERN, a research institution in France and Switzerland, carrying important cargo: antimatter. It was the first time this hard-to-contain material was successfully transported outside the facility where CERN scientists created it.
Antimatter is basically the opposite of regular matter—stuff that has mass and takes up space. Antimatter is made up of tiny particles that have the same masses as the protons, electrons, and neutrons in matter but opposite electric charges. When matter and antimatter meet, they destroy each other. To prevent this, scientists suspended the antimatter in a cylinder with an electromagnetic field in a near-airless vacuum.
Now that CERN scientists have proved that antimatter is portable, their aim is to transport it to other facilities to study and, hopefully, figure out why our universe contains far more matter than antimatter. “That’s the big picture question,” says Chris Rasmussen, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.