In 2018, Smorra and his team realised that they would need to move antimatter away from the factory to somewhere quieter – and hatched an escape plan. “We had seen the impact of the magnetic field fluctuations, so it was clear that we would eventually need to continue our precision measurements [elsewhere],” says Smorra.
This wasn’t an easy task. Containing antimatter typically requires powerful magnetic fields produced by superconducting magnets, which need to be kept at near-absolute zero, requiring huge amounts of power. Smorra and his team designed STEP to use just a 30-litre tank of liquid helium to keep the magnets cool, so the electronics can instead run on a simple diesel generator. For the upcoming test run, though, it will use only battery power.
The magnet also has to be engineered to cope with the stop-start accelerations that occur while driving, as well as a bespoke vacuum system to ensure that the absence of problematic regular matter can be maintained while the antiprotons are loaded into and unloaded from the trap.
Huh, I always assumed that antimatter would need to be produced on site where needed. The idea of putting it in a magnetic field "bottle" and trucking it around seems so impractical that I would not have thought to try. Pretty cool stuff.
