A portable Penning trap carried 92 antiprotons 7.5 km with none lost
Nature describes driving 92 antiprotons in BASE-STEP 7.5 km past CERN’s factory, with none of the particles reported missing and the vacuum not measurably worse. The magnet sat at 136 millitesla for the road run. Independent same-week news pages that expose a parseable datePublished were not obtained: HHU press HTML has only a time element, CERN’s page has none, and Physics World’s truck story is dated 25 March 2026.
Science··Evening
92 particles, 7.5 kilometres
Nature on 16 September describes loading 92 antiprotons into BASE-STEP, a cryogenic open Penning trap built to travel, then driving them beyond CERN’s Antimatter Factory along a 7.5 km route. The paper records no lost particles and no measurable vacuum degradation. CPT work on trapped antiprotons had been stuck at that factory because magnetic noise there limits sensitivity. The authors treat the drive as the opening move toward quieter offline labs, not as a finished delivery to Düsseldorf.[1]
136 millitesla on the road
The paper says the magnet was ramped to a 136 millitesla transport field for the road run. Counting spectra spanning 33 days, with 12.3 hours running without an external operator, followed how many particles remained stored. A 100-fold CPT improvement is written as an expectation once the trap sits in a quiet lab, not as a number this drive measured. Moving the cloud into receiver traps at CERN or Düsseldorf is still described as future work.[1]
Receiver traps still unbuilt
The Nature paper still treats injection into receiver traps at CERN or Düsseldorf as work that has not been built. The 100-fold CPT figure remains an expectation for a quieter lab, not a result of this 7.5 km drive. Spectra across 33 days are how the stored count was followed after the road run.[1]
