What happens if you drop 0.125 grams of antimatter?

There is a prequel to the Da Vinci Code.

It's called Angels and Demons.

And in it, terrorists steal 1/8 of a gram of antimatter

from CERN to try to blow up the Vatican.

Because the thing is, when antimatter

and matter meet, they annihilate,

turning nearly 100% of their combined mass into pure energy.

This is via E= MC².

It is the most violent process physics allows. >> Let's go. Oh my god.

>> Now that was just a novel, but CERN actually is making antimatter

and we got to visit it.

>> This is CERN's antimatter factory.

There's anti-roton going beneath our >> They are under our feet at this time.

Here, protons are accelerated

up to the speed of light

and smashed into an aridium target

to produce 20 million anti-rotons every minute.

This is so much bigger than I was thinking. This is crazy.

Antimatter is the most expensive

substance in the universe.

1 billion per >> No way. Go up.

We are missing zeros

>> And CERN makes it to do something that seems impossible.

So, you're making anti-atoms?

>> CERN made the first anti-hydrogen

atoms back in 1995,

but they quickly ran into a problem

because those anti-atoms only survived for 40 billionth of a second before annihilating,

which is way too short to do anything useful with it.

If only they could figure out how to store antimatter,

then they could study it and try to find ways in which it might

differ from normal matter.

They knew that any unexpected

difference could reveal entirely new physics.

So, how do you store antimatter

in a world full of matter?

Well, that's one of the problems CERN has been obsessing

over for the last 30 plus years.

It has allowed them to do some of the most precise

tests of antimatter to date.

And they even managed

to trap antimatter in a box,

load it onto a truck, and ship it.

And they are doing all of this to try and solve one of the

biggest unsolved mysteries in all of physics.

To understand it, we must go back to a discovery made around 100 years ago.

Previously on Veritasium, we learned how a strange physicist

Paul the Rock came up with an equation to unite special relativity with quantum mechanics.

It worked surprisingly well, but The Rock was stumped by his own equation

because the solution for an electron at rest was kind of strange.

There were two possible energies,

E= MC^2 and E= minus MC^2.

But how could an electron have negative energy?

Well, instead of throwing away his negative energy solution,

The Rock ended up proposing something radical.

This negative energy solution

corresponded to an entirely

new particle unknown to physics at the time.

It would have the same mass as an electron

but carry opposite charge.

It would be an anti-electron or positron.

Miraculously, a year later, the first posetron

was observed by accident in nature.

Over the following decades,

physicists built on the rock's equation

to form an entirely

new framework of quantum mechanics. quantum field theory.

This didn't just explain why there are antiparticles,

but it also answered a more fundamental

question, which is why is every electron

in the universe exactly the same?

The answer began to take shape when people figured out that fundamental

particles aren't just particles

or waves, but rather excitations

of a quantum field.

So you'd have an electron field that permeates all of space.

And this field can get excited,

but only in identical

discrete units, each with the same mass, spin, and charge.

And that's why every electron is the same.

They're all excitations of the same field.

Now, you could have several excitations,

that would be several electrons,

and they can move around, too.

The only requirement is that they can never overlap exactly.

Of course, there is nothing special about this kind of excitation.

You could just as well have a mirror opposite.

In fact, the equations

that describe this field require

such excitations to exist.

They have the same mass and spin

but with opposite charge.

This is the idea of an anti-electron

or It's exactly what that minus sign in the rock's equation was revealing.

And just like an electron,

posetrons can move around, too.

Only posetrons can overlap with electrons.

But watch what happens when they do.

Now, I'm simplifying a little here,

but because they're each other's mirror images,

the opposite charges cancel each other out.

The excitations disappear and the field returns back to its ground state.

But that would predict that the particles just disappear.

So, how is that possible?

Where did the mass go?

Well, the only way this could work is if that mass got converted into

something else, energy according to E= MC².

The energy got transferred into a different quantum field, the photon field.

And that is what we mean by annihilation.

Now, people realize that most fundamental

particles could be described

using the same approach

where each could be seen as an excitation

of their very own quantum field.

Now, this meant two things.

The first is that most particles

must have an antiparticle

twin because they're just mirror excitations

in the same field.

There are some exceptions

though, like the photon and hig boson,

which are their own antiparticle.

And the second and more important implication

is that each antiparticle

must be exactly equal to a normal particle

just with the opposite

But then around the mid1 1960s,

people realized that there was a big issue with this explanation.

And it all stemmed from how it fit in with the newly accepted big bang theory.

In the very first moments

after the big bang,

the universe was extremely

hot and dense and photons had so much energy

that the reverse process of annihilation happened.

So two photons could come together and spontaneously

convert their energy into the mass and kinetic energy of a particle antiparticle pair.

And so the universe was filled with these pairs continuously

popping into and out of existence.

But as the universe continued to expand,

it cooled and those photons

lost energy until around 3 seconds after the big bang, they had lost so

much energy that pair production stopped.

And this is what troubled physicists

in the 1960s because they believe that in those initial stages

an equal amount of matter and antimatter

should have been created.

But if an equal amount of matter and antimatter

were created then every particle

should have found its antiparticle

twin and annihilated meaning there should be no stuff around us.

No matter and no antimatter

just photons only radiation.

So this became known as the big bang radiation

catastrophe because clearly when we look around us

we see a lot more than just energy.

The universe is filled with matter.

But how can that be?

Why is there now more matter than antimatter in the universe?

Where did that asymmetry come from?

Well, that is one of the biggest

unsolved mysteries in all of physics.

Initially, some people tried to brush this away and they argued that perhaps

there is no asymmetry at all.

>> Maybe we happen to be in a pocket

that because of blind random chance, some reasonable

statistical fluctuations where most surrounded by matter and there' be some region that would

again be like like a Marvel movie, like some mirror universe,

there would be mo slightly,

you know, imbalance in the other direction.

>> Paul the Rock seemed to have favored this approach.

He argued that there might be entire anti-stars

and he ended his 1943

Nobel lecture by saying

there may be half the stars of each kind.

The two kinds of stars would both show exactly the same spectra

and there would be no way of distinguishing

them by present astronomical methods.

Physicist Edward Harrison took this one step further,

saying there should even be entire anti-galaxies.

And then people realize, well, if that's the case, there'd be regions where these

boundaries where the two regions would meet, and that should be lighting up the sky.

Should be tons of matter, antimatter annihilations.

Should be tons of of very high energy light.

So, people surfed the sky looking for these hot spots,

but they didn't find any.

And so, this possibility was ruled out.

There really is more matter than antimatter in our universe.

There really is an asymmetry.

So the next obvious question

is well how large is that asymmetry?

If we go back to around 10 seconds after the big bang we

can figure it out.

By this time pair production had long stopped a full 7 seconds ago

and by now just about every antiparticle

had annihilated with its particle counterpart

and turned into photons.

Now, the universe was filled with just some leftover particles

like electrons and protons whizzing around at incredible

speeds and those remnant photons.

But because these electrons and protons were traveling so fast, they couldn't come together to form atoms.

So, you had this plasma

of charged particles and that meant that when photons were going around, they scattered

off those charged particles.

So, they couldn't travel very far without interacting with matter.

That all changed around 380,000

years after the Big Bang.

By now, the electrons and protons had slowed down enough to form neutral atoms,

and photons could only be absorbed by electrons in atoms

if they had exactly the right energy to move the electron

up an energy level.

In practice, this meant that photons

could now basically travel through space

Those atoms then went on to form all the stars and galaxies,

and those photons stuck around, too.

They've gone on to make up the low-level radiation

that permeates the entire observable

universe, the cosmic microwave background or CMB.

And when we estimate

the total number of photons

in that CMB, we find that there are about 10 to the 89.

And because almost all of those photons

were originally created during those very first seconds after the big bang,

that original annihilation, we can infer that there must originally

have been around 10 to the 89

particles and Now, we can also estimate how many ordinary matter particles

like protons and neutrons

there are in the observable universe today.

The ones that survived that annihilation.

And what we find is that there are about 10 to the 80

So that means that for every billion antimatter

particles and billion matter particles there were in the early universe

when they annihilated they did so almost perfectly.

But there was one

one out of a billion matter particles that somehow survived.

And everything we see around us today is a descendant

of those lucky one in a billion particles.

Every person, animal, jungle, and ocean,

every asteroid colliding or galaxy

spiraling, every single dot of light in the night sky

is made up of one of those lucky

one in a billion particles.

And that brings us to the craziest part because it tells us that there

must be a difference between matter

and antimatter and how they evolve according to the laws of physics.

But it's not just any difference.

No, it would make sense if they behaved completely different.

I mean, you would just have different laws of physics governing

each type of particle

or it would make sense if they were governed by the exact same laws.

But in that case, there would be no difference.

It would be completely symmetric.

What's really weird here is that the laws are almost

exactly the same, but with a tiny difference.

And that doesn't make any sense.

For the past 70 years, physicists

have tried to explain where this asymmetry comes from.

But so far, all attempts have failed.

And part of the reason this has been so difficult

is because our laws of physics are full of

In the mid 1950s,

there were three symmetries

all particles were believed to obey.

Charge, par, and time reversal symmetry.

Charge symmetry is super simple.

It just means that if you swap all positive charges

with negative ones and vice versa,

then the interactions don't change.

In other words, there is nothing special about a positive or negative charge.

Just that one is exactly equal and opposite to the other.

To understand parity symmetry,

consider this mirror which creates a sort of parallel universe

where everything is the same but reflected.

So my left hand becomes my right hand and vice versa.

Now take this molecule

here which is llanine

an important amino acid we need to make proteins.

Now that L is in its name because the amine group this NH2

part over here is on the left but in the mirror you see its

sister molecule dlanine that NH2

part is now on the right.

And if you try to make elanine in a lab you'll find that you'll

get 50% llanine and 50% dlanine.

In other words, there is no experiment you could do that determines whether you're

in our universe or in the mirror universe.

And the same is true for many left and right-handed molecules.

If you just try to make them normally in a lab, you'll get 50% of each.

So, our universe doesn't favor left or right-handedness.

Lastly, time reversal symmetry means that the laws of physics work the same whether

time is running forwards or backwards.

Now, out of all of these, time reversal symmetry

might feel strange because there are many things that clearly

don't work backwards in time.

You can't uncook an egg, unshhatter

a wine glass, or turn a plant back into a seat.

But all of these follow from the second law of thermodynamics,

which describes how many interacting

particles evolve from less likely states,

typically more ordered, to more likely states, typically a mess.

But this is a statistical law.

It's not a fundamental law of physics.

If you zoom in to the level of individual particles,

then every interaction is perfectly reversible.

You can tell whether these collisions happen forwards

or backwards in time.

Now, the combination of all of these symmetries combined is called CPT symmetry.

And CPT symmetry, it turns out, is kind of a big deal.

>> What happens if CPT gets broken?

>> Well, literally cats and dogs start living together. Time flows backwards.

all kinds of things start uh breaking in our in our description of nature.

Now, one of the reasons why

why CPT and the standard model go

so well together is because it really is built into the very structure of special relativity.

>> Special relativity is built on one core principle

which is that the laws of physics are the same for all inertial

observers and this includes

any measurement they make of the speed of

In the 1950s, Julian Schwinger,

Hardert Lutters, and Wolffrang

Pi proved that if our universe obeys this principle,

which we strongly believe it does,

then it must be CPT symmetric.

But the reverse is also true.

If you break CPT

symmetry, then this core principle also breaks.

And that's where things get tricky

because after the Rock united special relativity

with quantum mechanics, all following quantum theories also incorporated special relativity.

And so our best theories of reality,

quantum field theory and the standard model

are built on that exact same principle.

So now we have a paradox

because on the one hand we need a symmetry to explain why we're here.

But on the other hand, if CPT symmetry

breaks, it tears down our best theories with it.

So physicists started off on a hunt for a special kind of asymmetry.

an asymmetry that could explain that one in a billion discrepancy

while also maintaining the larger CPT symmetry.

The first clue that such as

might exist came in the mid1 1950s.

Up until then, every interaction that had been studied conserved the individual symmetries

of CP and T

and so conserved CPT as a whole.

But in 1956, theoretical

physicists Sunung Da and Chen Niny Young

realized that no one had checked whether parity is conserved in the weak nuclear force.

So they set out to test whether the universe favored left or

And to do it, they enlisted the help of one of Lee's colleagues,

one of the world's best experimentalists,

Chen Shung Buu, also known as Madame Wu.

Once the idea of the experiment was pitched to her, then she just went all in. She canceled trips.

She worked straight over holiday breaks.

It was really a a all hands-on deck operation

over a very frenzied few months.

When Powi learned of the experiment, he said, "I do not believe that the

Lord is a weak left-hander,

and I am ready to bet a very high sum that the experiments

will give symmetric Now, all that was left to do was run the experiment.

It worked something like this.

She started with cobalt 60, an isotope of cobalt where the nucleus has an

intrinsic angular momentum or spin.

When she applied a strong magnetic field, she forced all the spins to point

in the same direction.

But cobalt 60 is also radioactive.

So every once in a while a neutron inside one of its nuclei

decays into a proton

releasing an electron and anti-utrino

and leaving a nickel 60 atom behind.

Now the electrons emitted could travel in two directions.

They could either go in the same direction as the nuclear spin

or they could go in the opposite way.

But if spin is clockwise in our universe,

then it is also clockwise

when reflected in the mirror.

Which means it points in the same direction in both universes.

So the only way the experiment could be the same in our universe and

the mirror universe is if the electrons were emitted in equal amounts in each direction.

It should be 50% on each side.

But what Wu actually found was that around 60%

of the electrons moved in the opposite

direction to the nuclear spin,

which would mean that 60%

moved in the same direction as the nuclear spin in the mirror universe.

But that meant that there is an experiment you could do to tell whether

you're in our universe

or the mirror universe.

So it proved that par is not conserved.

This shocked the physics

PI upon being informed of the results exclaimed that's total nonsense.

>> Very smart people Nobel laureates said

that can't be right. Do it again.

I don't believe it.

I you know and and

in a sense you can see where they're coming from.

There had been no

hint as yet that the that that kind of the universe would care whether

I'm looking at myself

you know in a mirror or not.

>> So others repeated the experiment

and by 1957 there was no further room for doubt.

God really was a weak

That same year, Lee and Young won the Nobel Prize in physics for the

discovery of parity violation,

but Wu's name was left off.

Lee and Young acknowledged her during their speech

and tried to get her nominated for a prize another year.

But the Nobel Committee never honored her.

In a way, she was robbed of the Nobel Prize.

1988 winner Jack Steinberger

called this the biggest mistake in the Nobel Committee's history.

But her work had done something important.

It had cast doubt on the long-held

belief that charge parity

and time reversal were fundamental

symmetries of our universe.

This made many physicists uncomfortable.

So they came up with a workaround.

Maybe it's okay if parity symmetry was broken

because that's not a fundamental symmetry of nature.

It's just part of a larger symmetry charge par.

The idea was that if you reflected

everything in a mirror and swapped all the particles for their antiparticles,

then the symmetry would be restored

and all would be good again.

But then 7 years later, two physicists

found that some particles

also violated the combined charge parity symmetry.

Now physicists were getting really nervous.

Two symmetries that they believed were fundamental

parts of our universe were broken.

So the next big question on everyone's mind was

is CPT symmetry also

going to fail and take down the standard model with it.

Then in 1973 something seemingly miraculous happened.

Makot Kobayashi and Toshihida

Mascawa found a way to explain

all the observed P and CP violation

while maintaining CPT symmetry

and it all fit directly

within the standard model.

The only issue is that when it comes to the matter antimatter

asymmetry, it can only account for an asymmetry

of 10 to the minus 18,

which is a billion times less than we need to explain the observed matter antimatter asymmetry.

So the ingredients are there,

which is cool cuz we didn't think even the ingredients were there,

>> but they're not there in a large enough strength.

You don't have a strong enough rate of CP violation if you just strict

with stick with strictly the standard model.

And so are people now getting nervous about CPT?

>> Not nervous, I'd say excited.

>> And that's because this means there is likely new physics

beyond the standard model.

But to find out what that might be,

we must study antimatter

up close to see if there are any ways in which it might be

different from normal matter.

Ways that could explain that asymmetry.

So you know where we're >> Oh. Oh, look. There it is. CERN, baby. Woo!

CERN is best known for the Large Hadron

Collider, a 27 km

underground ring where protons

are accelerated up to

the speed of light.

Beams traveling in opposite directions are smashed together,

releasing huge amounts of energy.

It's the closest we get to the high energy conditions of the early universe.

But at the southern edge of the LHC,

there is a smaller

proton accelerator called the proton synretron.

Protons in this ring are only accelerated

to 99.93% the speed of light.

And some of that proton beam is fed out of the ring and ends up here.

This is CERN's antimatter factory.

And in here you make anti-rotons. How many?

>> Uh, usually it's around

40 million every couple of minutes.

We are now going to enter

the facility by actually a technical building which is

not very interesting to watch.

>> I find this all interesting to watch.

>> To make sure we're safe, we always had to carry around these devices.

So, you've got two

what are they called? >> Yeah.

Just to be safe.

>> These are standard devices

to measure the amount of

uh dose of radiation that you get.

This is a supervised

radiation environment which means it's it's an environment in which we keep an eye

onto the amount of radiation we get as radiation workers.

>> Where are we going now?

>> So now we are going to

enter into the main building.

>> There's antimatter behind this behind this door. >> Yes. Under our feet. >> Oh wow. >> Yeah. We'll see. You'll see.

>> Please guys, this is

this is a huge place.

This is so much bigger than I was This is crazy.

Well, I feel like I'm a kid in a candy store looking at this.

>> This place is pretty It's pretty fun, huh?

The first time you see it.

>> Yeah, it's so impressive.

>> Here you see pretty much the scheme of how this facility is working.

You get protons coming from one of the CERN accelerators,

the the PS, which smash onto a target.

The protons are accelerated

up to around 99.93%

the speed of light and have energies

up to 26 ga electron volts.

They're aimed at a remarkably small target, an iridium

rod 3 mm in diameter and 55

mm across which itself is embedded in a graphite

and then in a titanium alloy structure.

Iridium was chosen because it's the second densest element on Earth.

And that means that there are a lot of nuclei

packed in a small space,

which increases the odds that the protons will hit something.

But when one of these protons hits an aridium nucleus,

it doesn't bounce off like you'd expect in most collisions.

It is going so fast and has so much energy

that it penetrates the nucleus

where it collides directly

with one of the neutrons or protons.

And to understand what happens next, we need to look at what's going on inside the proton.

Because a proton is not a fundamental particle.

Instead, it is made up of three fundamental

particles known as quarks.

Specifically, two up and one down quark.

Those quarks whiz around close to the speed of light.

So to keep all those quirks contained,

traveling at such incredible

speeds and in such a small space

requires a very strong force,

which is why it's called the strong force.

And it's mediated by particles known as gluons.

You can think of this force as acting like a rubber band.

But you can bring this past its breaking point.

If you keep putting in energy,

then you can put in so much energy

that another quark anti-quark

pair will be created.

This bond breaking into pair creation

can happen several times in a row and results in this sort of shower

of quark anti-quark pairs.

And a similar thing happens when a proton collides with a neutron or proton

inside an aridium nucleus.

Now most of those pairs stay just like that

pairs and they travel off.

But occasionally you will get two anti-up

and one anti-own quark to come close enough

and they form a new particle

made of free anti-quarks.

They form an anti-roton

and their counterparts will go on to form a

Now all of this this entire process

from initial collision to the shower of particles and the formation of the anti-roton

happened in the span of 10

to the minus23 seconds.

That is a 100 billion

trillionth of a second.

It is absolutely insane.

And every time you hit the target, you get trillions of these collisions.

And out the other side

comes a chaotic spray of protons,

anti-roton, and a bunch of other particles

all traveling at around 96%

the speed of light.

Magnets then filter out the anti-rotons

from the other particles, and they're sent on to the next stage.

And then we collect these anti-rotons,

bring them into the ring, the anti-roton

decelerator ring, which is the one we are staring on top of.

And then they they circulate in the ID for a while while they get cooled down.

So the idea here is really

that we get these antirotons

every 2 minutes more or less.

It's about 30 million of them.

>> How expensive is it antimatter?

>> Look guys, what is what is value?

It's a bit difficult to evaluate it, right? For sure.

It's probably the most expensive

state of matter we can build on Earth

>> How about I name some numbers and you tell me if it's cheap or too expensive?

>> $1 billion per gram. >> No way. >> It's too cheap.

>> Orders of magnitude too cheap.

But many orders of >> mag.

That's what I was thinking.

$100 billion per gram. >> No way. Go up.

I think uh probably you miss other three zeros. free zeros. >> I think so. Per gram. Yes. At least.

>> If you're wondering what you would do with all that money,

you should check out today's video sponsor, SoFi.

SoFi is an all-in-one finance app that lets you bank, borrow, and invest.

And with their premium membership,

SoFi Plus, you get benefits such as investment matches,

unlimited access to financial planners,

and a competitive APY

on savings to earn interest on your money.

All so you can let your money work for you.

By adding up all of these benefits,

you could unlock $1,000

or more in annual value with qualifying activities.

Of course, it depends on how you use the app, so check if it's right for you.

And you can get started by subscribing to SoFi Plus for just $10 per month.

Right now, they're also running a promotion for US residents.

So, if you join SoFi Plus between now and April 15th,

you'll automatically be entered into their giveaway for a chance to win $75,000

as well as other cash prizes and free memberships.

So, to check out SoFi Plus, head to sofi.com/varitasium

or click the link in the description.

I'd like to thank SoFi

for sponsoring this video.

And now, back to antimatter.

There's anti-roton going beneath our >> They are under our feet at this time. Yes, indeed.

>> And it's not dangerous.

>> No, no, it's not dangerous.

There's no risk whatsoever.

>> Strong electric fields in the decelerator

slow down the anti-rotons

from 96% to 10%

the speed of light.

But that's still about 100 million kmh.

To do experiments with them, they need to be slowed down more.

Initially, this was done in a kind of crazy way.

The anti-proton beam was fired at a thin plastic foil which annihilated

99.9% of all the anti-roton.

But around 0.1% of those anti-rotons

survived and they came out slow enough to do experiments with them.

Of course, this was very inefficient.

And so in 2015

and 2016, a secondary ring called Elena was installed.

Elena slows the anti-rotons

to 1.5% the speed of light.

A nice slow 16.2

million kilometers per hour. >> This is running.

>> You are watching a live anti-roton

>> Are the anti-rotons going around in these circles? >> Exactly.

The blue devices are magnets,

dipole magnets, which by lawren force make the particles turn.

Then you have the orange ones which are quadruple

magnets which manage the focusing of this beam.

They're like lenses for particles.

It's a pretty pretty thin

pipe almost that they go for. >> Yeah.

I mean, you don't need much there, right?

Because as long as you don't bend the particles, they just want to go straight.

You need to keep good vacuum in there.

Very good vacuum in fact.

Otherwise, they would anhilate.

>> And how often do you have annihilations

in this loop >> in here? >> Yeah.

Because you can't have perfect >> Well, no. No.

you have a bit of losses but you know the entire process of catching

I mean from the moment of catching

to the moment of extraction to the experiments

I think these days

we are about 86%

efficiency they have made it very efficient

after the anti-roton have been slowed down in Alena

they are sent onto five different experiments

each of which is designed to study different properties of antimatter

to try and find ways in which antimatter

behaves differently from normal matter

One of the first experiments that was done which happened before the antimatter

factory was built was testing whether the mass of a proton and anti-roton are the same.

But to do that it brings us back to our original problem.

How do you store antimatter?

The way they solve this problem is pretty clever.

They started with a tube which was pumped down to a vacuum.

A superconducting magnet sits around this tube and it creates a magnetic field that

confines charged particles to the center.

At the same time, electrodes

generate electric fields that function as endcaps,

preventing the particles from escaping out the ends.

The whole tube is then cooled down to around 4 kel or -269°.

This causes almost all the remaining particles to condense

and freeze, resulting in a vacuum pressure comparable to outer space.

So now they could fill this tube with something like anti-roton.

And once inside, those anti-rotons

have nothing to annihilate with and nowhere to go. They are trapped.

They had just built a real life antimatter trap.

The technical term for this is a penning trap after France penning whose work

inspired the first one.

Fittingly, the team that did this at CERN was called trap.

With the anti-roton trapped, they measured the charge to mass ratio of the anti-roton

and compared it to that of the proton

and they found it was equal to one part in 10 billion.

Now, the pinning traps made studying antimatter

much easier, and so it became a key tool that the other experiments

at the factory adopted.

In 2017, the base experiment

used it to measure the anti-roton's

magnetic moment, and they found that within their level of accuracy,

it was equal and opposite

to that of the proton.

So, thus far, everything was behaving just as predicted.

But there is one force that they hadn't directly probed yet. Gravity. gravity.

Could that be part of the solution?

>> It very likely will be.

Ultimately, part of why is because

gravity does not obey

the rules of special relativity,

which means it doesn't have to obey the CPT

theorem like the SE model does.

And so, in principle, that's

um an area within which one could

more naturally expect larger

values of violations of C and CP and and so on or even a CPT altogether.

In fact, back in the 1950s,

a few physicists entertained the idea of anti-gravity,

that antimatter would be gravitationally repulsive.

So, while matter falls down in the Earth's gravitational

field, antimatter would rise up.

You had a basketball made of antimatter, that would be easy to test, but

getting a basketball of antimatter without it blowing up on you is pretty hard.

So, it's it's not an easy thing to do um gravity experiments on particles.

You can't just drop an anti-roton

and see if it falls because anti-rotons

are negatively charged and the electric force is much stronger than gravity.

So even small stray electric fields would influence them way more than gravity would.

So what you need is something neutral.

What you need is an anti-atom.

>> So you're making anti-atoms.

>> How do you make the anti-atom?

So what we do is

we we use antipotons

and basically we merge them

they become >> Now there are several ways to make antihydrogen

and different experiments do it in different ways

but for Gar it all starts here in this bunker.

>> In this bunker we have a small accelerator.

So we make our ourselves our

positrons and then we

capture them in a trap here.

They accelerate a beam of electrons up to 99.9%

the speed of light and then fire those at a tungsten target.

Now while tungsten itself is electrically

neutral at the high speed those electrons

enter the tungsten they get close enough to the nuclei

that the electron cloud can no longer screen the intense positive charge within.

Thus, these nuclei create strong electric fields,

and those fields then yank the electrons around,

causing them to rapidly decelerate

as if they've just slammed on the brakes.

But the thing is, when these electrons

break, they lose energy by emitting photons.

The Germans have a great word for this.

It's called Brealum or breaking radiation.

This breaking radiation produces a wide range of photons

ranging from low energy X-rays

all the way up to nearly 9 mega electron volt gamma rays.

Now, out of all of these photons,

it's the gamma rays above roughly

one mega electron fold that are important

because when one of these gamma rays passes close to a tungsten nucleus,

there's a chance that it transfers its momentum to that nucleus and converts all

its energy into the mass and kinetic energy of an electron posetron pair.

But unfortunately, this isn't a clean process that just makes electron posetron pairs.

It produce posetrons but it also produce a lot of photons,

gamma rays, neutrons and these are

deadly >> and that particle mass creates two problems.

The first is that deadly

radiation >> supposed to be one of the highest

strongest source of radiation at sun.

>> This is one of the highest. >> Yes.

If you enter while it is

working you die in 10 seconds.

>> You die in 10 seconds. >> You cannot escape. >> It's terrifying.

You melt from inside.

>> You melt from inside.

You're saying that way too casually.

>> And the second problem is that what comes out of the tungsten

isn't a nice uniform beam of posetrons.

Instead, you get a shower of electrons,

neutrons, posetrons, and photons

all mixed together, all traveling at different angles and different

The first problem is solved by encasing

the entire setup with massive

1.2 2 m thick,

67% concrete, and 33% iron blocks.

>> And this is enough to shield us. >> because it's photons. >> Yes.

This is 1,400 tons. >> Okay. Okay.

I feel a bit better now.

Is it running now? >> No.

But even if it runs, we can see just outside and it's okay. >> Okay. So, we're safe.

You wear >> your badge. Okay.

So, you would know. >> Yeah.

But I guess 10 seconds, not >> too late. >> Too late.

>> Solving the second problem is a little more involved.

And it's honestly one of the coolest combinations

of physics and engineering

I've ever come across. So strap in.

When the posetrons leave the tungsten target,

some are traveling at a few%

the speed of light, while others are traveling at more than 90%

the speed of light.

Now, this massive spread makes it very hard to work with.

So, we need to slow them down to around 0.34%

the speed of light

or around 3.7 million km hour.

The way they do this is kind of crazy

because they shoot the positrons.

Remember those are antiparticles

at a mesh of ultra fine

20 micrometer diameter tungsten

wires which of course are made of normal matter.

When a fast posetron

enters the tungsten wire,

it immediately loses energy due to scattering

off the tungsten atoms.

And this happens so fast that within around 10 picos seconds,

that is 10 trillionths

of a second, the posetron

has slowed down to match the thermal energy of the tungsten.

But now the posetron

is still trapped inside the wire.

So from here on, through a random walk of collisions and scattering,

it needs to find its way out.

And if it bumps into an electron

or gets stuck in a defect,

it never makes it out.

So you might expect almost none of these posetrons

to make it out and for almost all of them to find an electron and annihilate.

And you'd be right.

The efficiency of this process is terrible.

For every thousand fast posetrons

entering the mesh, only about one comes out as a usable slow posetron.

Another problem is that these posetrons

don't come out as a nice organized beam.

Instead, they are emitted at all kinds of angles.

So, we need to find a way to focus them.

This is done by letting the shower of particles go through a solenoid,

which is a long coiled wire with a current running through.

That current creates a magnetic field inside the coil that acts as a magnetic

lens and focuses the

This lets us capture many of the posetrons

emitted at wide angles that would otherwise be lost.

But right now we still have a mix of posetrons,

electrons, neutrons, and photons.

So the next step is to separate these.

To do this, we use another magnetic field.

This curves the electrons one way into a beam dump.

The photons and neutrons

because they have no electric charge are unaffected.

So they go straight through and are absorbed by shielding.

And the posetrons because of their positive charge

curve the opposite way to electrons

and they go on to the next stage.

Now we're left with a beam of just posetrons.

The only issue is that because of the terrible efficiency

from slowing down those posetrons,

each single shot only generates

around a thousand usable slow posetrons.

But we need millions

or even billions of slow posetrons

for the next stage.

So the solution is to accumulate

the posetrons in a particle

trap where over several minutes it builds up a posetron

cloud of around 100 million or more posetrons

which is enough for the next stage.

I said you merge positrons and antipotons

but we do even more complicated.

First we make posetronium.

Posetronum is >> Posetronium is an electron and a posetron

orbiting each other like a binary star system.

It's an exotic form of matter and it only lasts about 110th

to 142 nonds before the two come together and annihilate.

The way they make this is by using strong magnetic fields to compress the

cloud of posetrons and fire it at porous silicon dioxide films.

When these posetrons enter these films,

they rip away electrons from their atoms

and some of those electrons

then bind with posetrons to form posetronium.

And then a part of that posetronium

diffuses out of the films

into the vacuum of the next stage,

the interaction chamber where it's time for the final step.

>> So this is what we prepare this here. >> That's the posetronium. >> that's crazy.

>> We send antipotons to the posetronum

where it makes antihydrogen.

>> Now since posetronium only survives for about

142 nonds, this needs to be timed perfectly.

So, if you want to see where we

we catch the anti-roton.

>> Yes, I would love to see where you catch the anti-roton.

I was not expecting to get this close. >> It's right here. >> That's awesome. Okay.

So, we get the anti-rotons here.

>> And then what what what happens?

>> So, it goes there inside this box.

>> Inside the box, it will meet the

>> Oh, there meets the posetronium.

Kind of scared, honestly.

It It sounds like there's music in here.

>> As the posetronium enters the interaction chamber, the anti-roton

beam needs to be fired through at that exact moment.

When done correctly, around 3 million anti-rotons

or so pass through the posetronium.

If all goes well, around one to a few of those anti-rotons

steal a posetron to create an atom of

Okay, so we've got posetrons

coming through here, all the way through here.

And this is where you capture the

>> Yes, we accumulate them.

>> You accumulate them and then you shoot them through there and you make the

posetronium and then you shoot that into that chamber.

So it mixes with the anti-roton. >> So cool. It's so cool.

Right in here is where they make anti-atoms, anti-hydrogen.

They shoot the anti-rotons

through and they capture

they capture those anti-eleronss

to form anti-hydrogen which then travels through here and then you know it will

go all the way along there and they do their experiments. It's absolutely insane.

I feel like I should not be in here

but it's so cool.

Now one question I had after learning all of this is why?

I mean why do this?

Because the alpha G experiment

can already make 100 anti-hydrogen

atoms in 4 hours

using a much simpler process.

So why is the Gar team spending years

to build a particle accelerator,

a posetronium converter, and a way to shoot the anti-roton

through this posetronium just to make fewer

anti-hydrogen atoms in a slower

and more difficult way.

Especially when you consider that in 2023,

Alpha G did its own test to see whether anti-hydrogen

falls up or down.

Well, to understand why, we need to understand exactly

what it is that Alpha G did.

Their setup works something like this.

Phosetrons are created by a radioactive

source, accumulated, and are then injected up and trapped.

Anti-rotons then come in from Elena

are accumulated in a trap and then also injected in a trap that sits

just below the posetrons.

Next, the two antiparticle

clouds are gently merged.

This causes some of the anti-rotons

to capture a posetron and form anti-hydrogen.

Now, antihydrogen is neutral,

which means that the penning trap can no longer hold it.

So if nothing else was done, the anti-hydrogen

atoms would form, drift off, and within micros seconds

annihilate at one of the walls.

It would all be for nothing.

And this is exactly what happened with the earliest antihydrogen experiments.

They couldn't hold on to it.

Fortunately, there is a way to trap antihydrogen

because it has a small magnetic moment.

So a second magnetic trap was engineered

around the device which could capture the antihydrogen.

Unfortunately, that trap is pretty weak.

So, most anti-hydrogen atoms escape and annihilate,

but a few stay.

And the idea then is simple.

Slowly weaken the magnetic field holding them.

And as the trap gets weaker and weaker,

anti-atoms start to escape.

And if gravity pulls antimatter

down, like normal matter,

then more atoms should escape through the bottom than through the top.

So, what did they find?

Does antimatter fall up or down?

They found that antimatter falls down.

So it rules out any exotic theories of anti-gravity.

They measured the gravitational

acceleration as 75% of normal gravity

plus - 13% plus - 16%.

Which is possibly consistent with normal gravity.

But of course the error bars are huge.

And this is also why GBAR is so important

because their hope is to get the measurement accuracy

down to 1% and ultimately

to one in 100,000.

See, when you're doing a gravity experiment on atoms like this,

you want those atoms to be as still as possible before you drop them.

In other words, you want them to be as cold as possible.

Now, alpha G can get really cold to about 0.5

Kelvin, which is half a degree above absolute zero.

But GBAR wants to bring this way down to less than 10 micro Kelvin.

That is 50,000 times colder.

The way they plan on doing this is actually not by making antihydrogen

atoms, but by making an anti-hydrogen

ion, one anti-proton and two posetrons.

The hope is that once an anti-hydrogen

atom has formed, it runs into a second posetronium

atom and steals another posetron.

At first, that might seem strange because now we're back to having a charged particle.

And as we learned, you can just drop a charged particle and measure the

effects of gravity, but charged particles are actually much easier to trap and cool.

And we can use that

because now it can be held in a much stronger electromagnetic trap.

And once there, you can inject

ultra cold like 10 ml

burillium ions that have been laser cooled.

The anti-hydrogen ion then bounces around and collides with these burillium

ions slowly transferring its kinetic energy to them and thus cooling down

and they won't annihilate

because both particles are positively

charged so they repel each other.

Then you keep cooling down the burillium

ions using more advanced techniques

until you hit the micro kelvin range

and this is ultimately how they hope to reach a temperature of around 10 micro kelvin.

Now with the anti-hydrogen

ion as still as possible,

they shoot a laser pulse at it, dislodging

one of its posetrons

and resulting in a neutral anti-hydrogen atom.

And as a result, the electromagnetic

trap can no longer hold it and so it falls around 20 cm.

At that temperature and over that distance,

you can time the fall precisely

enough to measure the gravitational

acceleration to about 1%.

So all of this the particle accelerator

making the posetronium and then the hard way of cooling it

all of it is just to watch a single anti-atom

fall 20 cm because this process is the only known way to make anti-hydrogen

ions and using those ions is the only way to get antimatter

cold enough to perform an accurate enough experiment.

Now they haven't managed to do this yet.

So far, they've only made anti-hydrogen,

but if they can manage,

then it would be the most precise measurement of antimatter

under gravity, although this is likely still years away.

Now, one thing that makes this research

so tricky and also relatively

slow is that there is only one antimatter

factory in the world.

And so, the number of places that can study real antimatter is very limited.

But that might soon change.

All thanks to another experiment at the factory.

The base experiment was built to measure the magnetic moment of the anti-roton.

If CPT symmetry holds, then it should be exactly equal

and opposite to that of the proton.

But they kept running into a problem.

>> Accelerator is continuously ramping magnetic fields in the background. >> Right?

Even though these fluctuations

were tiny, around 20,000

times weaker than the Earth's magnetic field,

at the precision Bass was working at, they hit a wall.

>> The only concept um basically to overcome

this problem is to move the particles out of the accelerator.

>> So they built a penning trap with its own power supply,

its own cooling system, and two storage holds for anti-roton.

So now they could fill those holes with anti-rotons,

store them, and carry them to wherever they wanted.

They just created the world's

first portable antimatter trap.

So of course, I asked them a pressing scientific question.

Are you going to make it look super futuristic?

Because it it's got to be

the most badass transport container ever made.

>> I just have this

um trap here in my office.

Maybe I can show it to you.

>> this is one of these panning traps

and they are inside the superconducting magnet.

So the the the heavy part is basically the superconducting magnet.

But these are these trap electrodes and it works.

They have cracked the code of storing the most volatile

substance in the universe.

Their current record for storing anti-roton is 614 days.

That is they can store antimatter.

You know, the stuff that annihilates

as soon as it touches matter

for close to two years. That is absurd.

>> This is this anti-roton

reservoir trap that stores

um antirotons for longer than 1 or 2 years. >> That's awesome.

>> But here's what that means.

Because if you can store antimatter

for years in a box and you can put that box on a truck,

then why not ship it?

we can start distributing

anti-rotons to ambitious experiments

all around the planet and everyone

who has a good idea

what we could do with these particles

will get these particles.

I'm just imagining this map in my head where you have the big antimatter

factory and then it's going to be sending

antimatter all over the world to all the top research >> That's great, right?

That's a fantastic >> Yes. Yes. Yes.

And they've already started.

On the 24th of March 2026,

a crane lifted an 800 kg

trap out of the antimatter

factory and loaded it onto a truck

which then drove on a 10 km loop around CERN

and it was filled with 92 anti-rotons.

So perhaps Angels and Demons wasn't that far off after all.

In the near future,

there could be actual boxes of antimatter

that, at least in theory, could be stolen.

So, does that also mean that they were right about that 1/8

of a gram of antimatter?

Well, we wanted to find out,

so we tested it.

I mean, we simulated it.

>> This is like the most super villain call I've ever got.

>> I'm really getting into my villain arc here.

Okay, so let's find

our poor target, Fatican City.

We've got an eighth of a gram,

you know, selected right there. 0.125.

Who wants to do a >> Three, two, one. Let's go. Let's go.

>> Okay, so we we've got a few levels of destruction here.

We've got the fireball.

This is just all instantly vaporized.

It's turned into pure plasma, which is insane. >> Oh, St. Peter's Basilica.

It's got a temperature

of about 100 million degrees Celsius, which is, you know, pretty chill.

You can see it released about

* 10 13 jewels, or I guess about

22 trillion jewels, which is the equivalent of like

36% of the Hiroshima blast.

If we zoom out, this is the area of third degree burn.

So, your skin gets molten.

Bro, you're having way too much fun with this.

>> Can I ask this question?

Like, do we have a

an eighth of a gram of antimatter available for this?

Ask him for a

>> Can you really steal an eighth of a gram from CERN?

>> That's a good good question.

>> Do you know how much antimatter

you've made in total in this factory?

>> We make uh in the order of 10 to the 10

uh protons antirotons per year.

Now, we can make an estimate.

This facility is is around since 25 years.

So let's say this is 10 to the 11 protons.

A gram would mean

uh 10 to the 23.

So we are talking here of

uh well I'm not very good at man math but it's like

>> a trillionth of a gram.

>> That means that to make 1/8 of a gram of antimatter

the factory would have to run for longer than the age of the universe.

In fact, if you took all the 10 billion anti-rotons

they make in a year and annihilated

them all at once,

you would produce enough energy to heat 1 milll of water

by about 1° C.

>> I'd love to see Croatia

get just for for size and scale. >> How much? >> You tell me. >> All right.

10 g of antimatter.

>> Sure, let's do it. >> Oh my god.

So, while 10 g of antimatter

would destroy an entire city, >> bye-bye hometown.

>> The amounts of antimatter

they're making at CERN are in no way dangerous.

Which is also part of the reason we had some fun with this simulation

because for the fareseeable

future, it's just not realistic

to talk about having macroscopic amounts of antimatter. >> Yeah.

So, if people want to play around with this, we'll put a link in the description.

Uh yeah, have fun.

>> Or if you'd rather get some antimatter

yourself without having to rub CERN,

then I'll tell you how to get some.

Just go to your local supermarket

and buy yourself this some bananas.

That's because a banana contains trace amounts of the radioactive isotope potassium 40.

And roughly every 75

minutes, one of these atoms decays

and releases a posetron.

Which means that if you wanted to match the antimatter

facto's output in terms of antiparticles,

you would need about a billion bananas.

Now, that's a lot of bananas,

and I don't recommend eating that many.

But the thing is,

even if you never eat any bananas,

odds are there are some trace amounts of radioactive

materials inside of you,

and some of those will produce antimatter.

One article estimates that the average human makes around

180 posetrons per hour.

And so there truly is no need to be scared of antimatter

because you have been your own little antimatter factory all along.

Hey, just a few final things.

The first thing is I want to give a big shout out to Physics

Girl who made an amazing video for the antimatter factory years ago.

And ever since I watched that video, I've always wanted to go.

So, it's been a huge inspiration

and I highly recommend you check out that video here.

The other thing is I want to give a quick shout out to all

the people at CERN.

Those who helped us with all the animations,

those who've hosted us and taken the time to explain their live work and

everyone else, thank you so much.

And the third and final thank you is of course, as always, to you.

Thank you so much for watching and I'm excited to see you at the next one. Anti-Casper. Casper annihilate. >> All right, that's