24th November 2025 Breakthrough in antimatter production Scientists at CERN have reported an eightfold increase in the rate of production of antimatter, achieved by using laser-cooled beryllium ions to cool positrons to nearly absolute zero. This technique allows 15,000 antihydrogen atoms to be created in under seven hours.
When you hear the word 'antimatter', you probably think of something exotic and unstable – an extremely volatile source of energy, perhaps driving starships of the distant future. The concept sounds like science fiction, yet scientists at CERN and other institutes now handle it regularly in well-established facilities. Today, we know that when matter and antimatter collide, the two annihilate each other and release their mass as pure energy, a process far more efficient than any chemical or nuclear reaction. We also know that in the very earliest moments of the Universe, matter and antimatter should have existed in perfect balance, yet some subtle asymmetry caused a tiny excess of matter to survive once the rest annihilated. That small imbalance eventually formed all the stars, planets and galaxies we see today. At the Antimatter Factory in Geneva, the ALPHA collaboration creates antihydrogen – the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen – and traps it long enough for researchers to study its behaviour in exquisite detail. These experiments aim to answer fundamental questions about why the Universe contains so much matter and almost no primordial antimatter.
In their latest study, published this month in Nature Communications, CERN's ALPHA team reports a major step forward in how quickly they can accumulate trapped antihydrogen. Using their new cooling technique, they produced more than 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in under seven hours – an eightfold increase in speed compared with the previous record – and 2 million atoms over the entire study period. They achieved this by cooling positrons (the antimatter equivalent of an electron) in a new way. The team trapped positrons from a radioactive sodium source inside a device called a Penning trap, where electric and magnetic fields confined them. Under normal conditions, the positrons would swirl around the trap and cool themselves only slightly, limiting how efficiently they combine with antiprotons to form antihydrogen. The team's breakthrough came from adding a cloud of laser-cooled beryllium ions, allowing the positrons to lose energy through a process known as sympathetic cooling. This reduced their temperature to −266 °C, only seven kelvin above absolute zero, making the formation of antihydrogen atoms much more likely.
"The new technique is a real game-changer when it comes to investigating systematic uncertainties in our measurements," said Niels Madsen, study co-author, and leader of the positron-cooling project. "We can now accumulate antihydrogen overnight and measure a spectral line the following day." "These numbers would have been considered science fiction 10 years ago," said Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment. "With larger numbers of antihydrogen atoms now more readily available, we can investigate atomic antimatter in greater detail and at a faster pace than before." While this advance is a remarkable leap forward, the absolute amounts remain extraordinarily small. Even millions of antihydrogen atoms amount to far less than a trillionth of a gram, while the total antimatter produced by all laboratories in history remains at the nanogram level. One gram of antihydrogen would take about 62.5 trillion dollars to produce with today's efficiencies, a figure approaching half of global GDP. Still, the longer-term picture is fascinating to imagine. There are many orders of magnitude that will need to be reached – but if humanity keeps improving the rate of production and storage, we might accumulate gram, kilogram, or even tonne-scale quantities in the next few hundred years. That could enable technologies like antimatter-catalysed propulsion to neighbouring star systems. Our understanding of antimatter today may be comparable to how scientists viewed electricity in the 17th and 18th centuries: intriguing, poorly understood and full of hidden potential, before anybody had yet imagined light bulbs, power grids, or computers. What follows in the long run could be every bit as revolutionary.
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