CERN’s Antimatter Factory: How It Works and Why Matter Dominates

Name: Why It's Almost Impossible To Ship Antimatter
Uploaded: 2026-04-05T20:18:11.555354+00:00
Duration: 58 min 53 s
Channel: Veritasium
Description: Summary and key takeaways on Why It's Almost Impossible To Ship Antimatter — Summary, covering The Antimatter Factory Protons race to 99.93 % of light speed

Veritasium

Apr 05, 2026

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58 min video

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2 min read

YouTube video ID: jjp3WC8Unj8

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Protons race to 99.93 % of light speed before slamming into an iridium target. The high‑energy collision shatters quark bonds, spawning showers of particles that include antiprotons. Magnetic and electric fields filter the antiprotons, slow them down, and guide them into Penning traps cooled to 4 K in a near‑perfect vacuum. The resulting antimatter is the most expensive substance known, costing well over $100 billion per gram.

Theoretical Foundations

Dirac’s relativistic equation foretells particles identical in mass to electrons but bearing opposite charge—positrons. Quantum field theory expands this picture, describing all particles as excitations of underlying fields; antiparticles appear as mirror excitations of the same fields. When a particle and its antiparticle meet, their opposite charges cancel, the excitations vanish, and the mass converts into photons according to (E=mc^{2}).

The Big Bang Catastrophe

In the first moments after the Big Bang, extreme temperatures allowed continuous pair production of matter and antimatter. As the universe expanded and cooled, this process halted, leaving equal amounts of both. If annihilation had proceeded without bias, only radiation would remain. Observations of the cosmic microwave background, however, reveal a surviving matter‑to‑antimatter ratio of roughly one part per billion, exposing the profound mystery of matter‑antimatter asymmetry.

Symmetry and Violation

CPT symmetry—combined charge, parity, and time reversal—is a cornerstone of special relativity and the Standard Model. Madame Wu’s 1956 experiment shattered the belief that parity (P) is conserved in weak interactions, showing that 60 % of emitted electrons moved opposite to nuclear spin. Subsequent discoveries of CP violation demonstrate that charge and parity together are not absolute, yet the magnitude of known violations falls far short of explaining the observed cosmic imbalance.

Experimental Frontiers

The Alpha G experiment confirmed that anti‑hydrogen falls downward under Earth’s gravity, ruling out exotic anti‑gravity scenarios. The GBAR collaboration aims to measure the gravitational acceleration of anti‑hydrogen ions with 1 % precision by laser‑cooling them to 10 µK, using beryllium ions as a cold bath. Meanwhile, the BASE experiment has pushed storage limits, keeping antiprotons confined for 614 days in portable Penning traps, opening new possibilities for precision measurements of antimatter properties.

Takeaways

Protons accelerated to 99.93% of light speed smash an iridium target, creating antiprotons that are filtered, decelerated, and stored in 4 K Penning traps, making antimatter the most expensive substance at over $100 billion per gram.
Dirac’s equation predicted positrons as electron‑mass particles with opposite charge, and quantum field theory describes all particles as field excitations, with antiparticles as mirror excitations that annihilate into photons via E=mc².
The early universe should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, yet cosmic microwave background measurements reveal a surviving matter‑to‑antimatter ratio of roughly one part per billion, a discrepancy known as the matter‑antimatter asymmetry.
Experiments such as Madame Wu’s parity‑violation test and observed CP violation in the Standard Model demonstrate that C, P, and T symmetries are not fully conserved, but the known violations are insufficient to explain the observed imbalance.
Recent CERN experiments—Alpha G confirming anti‑hydrogen falls like normal matter, GBAR targeting 1 % gravity precision by cooling ions to 10 µK, and BASE storing antiprotons for 614 days—push the frontier of antimatter research.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does CERN produce and store antiprotons?

CERN produces antiprotons by accelerating protons to 99.93 % of light speed and colliding them with an iridium target, generating particle showers that include antiprotons; these are filtered, decelerated, and confined in ultra‑cold (4 K) Penning traps within a high‑vacuum environment, allowing long‑term storage despite antimatter’s extreme cost.

Why does the matter‑antimatter asymmetry remain unresolved despite known CP violation?

The observed matter‑antimatter imbalance persists because the Standard Model’s CP‑violation effects, first revealed by Madame Wu’s parity‑violation experiment and later quantified in weak interactions, are far too small to account for the roughly one‑in‑a‑billion excess of matter particles inferred from the cosmic microwave background.

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Helpful resources related to this video

If you want to practice or explore the concepts discussed in the video, these commonly used tools may help.

The Particle At The End Of The Universe Recommended

A book by Sean Carroll that explains the Higgs boson and the fundamental nature of particles, providing context for the Standard Model and antimatter research.

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Introduction To Elementary Particles Textbook

A standard academic text that covers the theoretical foundations of quantum field theory and symmetry violations discussed in the video.

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Cloud Chamber Kit For Physics Experiments

A physical device that allows users to visualize the tracks of subatomic particles, helping to understand particle detection and experimental physics.

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Qed The Strange Theory Of Light And Matter

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Full Transcript YouTube

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-protons 
going beneath our feet. They are under our feet at  
this time. Here, protons are accelerated up to 
99.93% the speed of light and smashed into an  
iridium target to produce 20 million anti-protons 
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  
gram. No way. Go up. We are missing zeros here. 
And CERN makes it to do something that seems  
impossible. So, you're making anti-atoms? Yes. 
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 billionths  
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 Dirac came up  
with an equation to unite special relativity with 
quantum mechanics. It worked surprisingly well,  
but Dirac 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,  
Dirac 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 poietron was observed by 
accident in nature. Over the following decades,  
physicists built on Dirac'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 positron. It's exactly what 
that minus sign in Dirac's equation was revealing.  
And just like an electron, positrons can 
move around, too. Only positrons 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 Higgs 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 charge.  
But then around the mid 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 
Dirac 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 unimpeded. 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 antiparticles.  
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 symmetry.
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 L-alanine  
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 D-alanine that  
NH2 part is now on the right. And if you try to 
make L-alanine in a lab you'll find that you'll  
get 50% L-alanine and 50% D-alanine. 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, unshatter a wine glass,  
or turn a plant back into a seed. 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 light. In the 1950s, Julian Schwinger, 
Gerhart Lüders, and Wolfgang Pauli 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 Dirac 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 asymmetry 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 asymmetries might 
exist came in the mid 1950s. Up until then,  
every interaction that had been studied conserved 
the individual symmetries of C, P and T and so  
conserved CPT as a whole. But in 1956, theoretical 
physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang  
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 right-handedness. And to do it, they enlisted  
the help of one of Lee's colleagues, one of the 
world's best experimentalists, Chien-Shiung Wu,  
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 Pauli 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 
results." 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-neutrino 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 parity is not conserved. This shocked the  
physics community. Pauli 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 left-hander. That same year, 
Lee and Yang 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 parity. 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. Makoto 
Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa 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 going. 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 99.9999%
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 synchrotron. 
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-protons. 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? Dosimeters. 
Yes. 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 
thinking. 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 giga 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 iridium 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 antiquark  
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 
antiquark pairs. And a similar thing happens when  
a proton collides with a neutron or proton inside 
an iridium 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-down quark to come close enough and they form 
a new particle made of free anti-quarks. They form  
an anti-proton and their counterparts will go 
on to form a proton. Now all of this this entire  
process from initial collision to the shower of 
particles and the formation of the anti-proton  
happened in the span of 10 to the minus 23 
seconds. That is a 100 billionth 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-proton,  
and a bunch of other particles all traveling 
at around 96% the speed of light. Magnets  
then filter out the anti-protons from the other 
particles, and they're sent on to the next stage.  
And then we collect these anti-protons, bring them 
into the ring, the anti-proton decelerator ring,  
which is the one we are staring on top of. And 
then they they circulate in the AD for a while  
while they get cooled down. So the idea here 
is really that we get these anti-protons 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 valuate it, right? For sure. It's probably  
the most expensive state of matter we can build on 
Earth today. How about I name some numbers and you  
tell me if it's cheap or too expensive? Shoot. 
$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. Three zeros? I think  
so. Per gram. Yes. At least. If you're wondering 
what you would do with all that money, you should  
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this video. And now, back to antimatter.
There's anti-proton going beneath our feet. 
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-protons from 96% to 10% the speed of light.  
But that's still about 100 million km/h. 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-proton. But around 0.1% of those  
anti-protons 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-protons 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-proton machine. Are the anti-protons  
going around in these circles? Exactly. The 
blue devices are magnets, dipole magnets,  
which by Lorentz 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 vacuum. 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-proton 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-proton are the same. But to do that it  
brings us back to our original problem. How do 
you store antimatter? The way they solved 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 Kelvin or -269°C. 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-proton. And once inside, 
those anti-protons 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 Frans Penning whose work inspired the first  
one. Fittingly, the team that did this at CERN 
was called trap. With the anti-proton trapped,  
they measured the charge to mass ratio of the 
anti-proton and compared it to that of the proton  
and they found it was equal to one part in 10 
billion. Now, the Penning 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-proton'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 Standard 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-proton 
and see if it falls because anti-protons 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. Yes. How do you make the  
anti-atom? So what we do is we we use antiprotons 
and positrons basically we merge them they become  
antihydrogen. Now there are several ways to 
make antihydrogen and different experiments do  
it in different ways but for gbar 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 brake, they lose energy  
by emitting photons. The Germans have a great 
word for this. It's called Bremsstrahlung or braking  
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 volts 
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 positron  
pair. But unfortunately, this isn't a clean 
process that just makes electron positron pairs.  
It produce positrons but it also produce a lot of 
photons, gamma rays, neutrons and these are deadly  
and that particle mess creates two problems. The 
first is that deadly radiation supposed to be one  
of the highest strongest source of radiation at 
CERN. 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 positrons. Instead,  
you get a shower of electrons, neutrons, 
positrons, and photons all mixed together,  
all traveling at different angles and different 
speeds. The first problem is solved by encasing  
the entire setup with massive 1.2m thick, 67% 
concrete, and 33% iron blocks. And this is enough  
to shield us. Yes, 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 sit just outside and it's okay. Okay. So,  
we're safe. You wear your 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 positrons 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 positron enters the tungsten wire,  
it immediately loses energy due to scattering 
off the tungsten atoms. And this happens so fast  
that within around 10 pico seconds, that is 10 
trillionths of a second, the positron has slowed  
down to match the thermal energy of the tungsten. 
But now the positron 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 positrons 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 positrons entering the mesh, only 
about one comes out as a usable slow positron.  
Another problem is that these positrons 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 positrons. This 
lets us capture many of the positrons emitted at  
wide angles that would otherwise be lost. But 
right now we still have a mix of positrons,  
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 positrons 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 positrons. The only  
issue is that because of the terrible efficiency 
from slowing down those positrons, each single  
shot only generates around a thousand usable 
slow positrons. But we need millions or even  
billions of slow positrons for the next stage. So 
the solution is to accumulate the positrons in a  
particle trap where over several minutes it builds 
up a positron cloud of around 100 million or more  
positrons which is enough for the next stage. I 
said you merge positrons and antiprotons but we do  
even more complicated. First we make positronium. 
Positronium is positronium. Yes. Positronium is an  
electron and a positron orbiting each other like a 
binary star system. It's an exotic form of matter  
and it only lasts about one tenth to 142 nanoseconds before 
the two come together and annihilate. The way they  
make this is by using strong magnetic fields to 
compress the cloud of positrons and fire it at  
porous silicon dioxide films. When these positrons 
enter these films, they rip away electrons from  
their atoms and some of those electrons then bind 
with positrons to form positronium. And then a  
part of that positronium 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  
positronium. Yes, that's crazy. We send antipotons 
to the positronium where it makes antihydrogen.  
Now since positronium only survives for about 142 
nanoseconds, this needs to be timed perfectly. So, if  
you want to see where we we catch the anti-proton. 
Yes, I would love to see where you catch the  
anti-proton. I was not expecting to get this 
close. It's right here. Yes. That's awesome. Okay.  
So, we get the anti-protons here. Yes. And then 
what what what happens? So, it goes there inside  
this box. Yeah. Inside the box, it will meet the 
positronium. Oh, there meets the positronium. Kind  
of scared, honestly. It It sounds like there's 
music in here. As the positronium enters the  
interaction chamber, the anti-proton beam needs 
to be fired through at that exact moment. When  
done correctly, around 3 million anti-protons or 
so pass through the positronium. If all goes well,  
around one to a few of those anti-protons steal a 
positron to create an atom of anti-hydrogen. Okay,  
so we've got positrons coming through here, 
all the way through here. And this is where  
you capture the positron. Yes, we accumulate 
them. You accumulate them and then you shoot  
them through there and you make the positronium 
and then you shoot that into that chamber. So it  
mixes with the anti-proton. Yep. So cool. It's so 
cool. Right in here is where they make anti-atoms,  
anti-hydrogen. They shoot the anti-protons through 
and they capture they capture those anti-electrons
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 gbar team 
spending years to build a particle accelerator,  
a positronium converter, and a way to shoot 
the anti-poton through this positronium 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. Positrons are 
created by a radioactive source, accumulated,  
and are then injected up and trapped. Anti-protons 
then come in from ELENA are accumulated in a trap  
and then also injected in a trap that sits just 
below the positrons. Next, the two antiparticle  
clouds are gently merged. This causes some of 
the anti-protons to capture a positron 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 positrons. The hope 
is that once an anti-hydrogen atom has formed,  
it runs into a second positronium atom 
and steals another positron. 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 mK beryllium ions  
that have been laser cooled. The anti-hydrogen 
ion then bounces around and collides with these  
beryllium 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 beryllium 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 positrons 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 positronium 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-proton. 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 BASE 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-proton. So now 
they could fill those holes with anti-protons,  
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. Oh, this is  
one of these Penning 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-proton 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-proton reservoir trap that stores um 
antiprotons 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-protons  
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 institutions. That's great, right? 
That's a fantastic vision. 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-protons. 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, Vatican City. We've got an eighth of 
a gram, you know, selected right there. 0.125. Who  
wants to do a countdown? Three, two, one. Let's 
go. Let's go. Oh, [ __ ] 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  
2.25 * 10 13 joules, or I guess about 22 trillion 
joules, 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 friend. 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-protons they 
make in a year and annihilated them all at once,  
you would produce enough energy to heat 1 ml 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 foreseeable 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 rob 
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 positron. Which 
means that if you wanted to match the antimatter  
factory'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 positrons 
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