A year of CERN antihydrogen has the energy of a phone tap

The most antihydrogen CERN could imagine making in a year, even if every atom were trapped and annihilated at once, would release only a few thousandths of a joule: about the energy of gently tapping a phone screen with a finger, according to the laboratory.

Annihilation itself is not the bottleneck. Matter and antimatter convert almost all their mass into energy, a process CERN rates about 50 times more efficient than nuclear fusion. The bottleneck is supply. CERN’s Antimatter Factory delivers roughly 400 million antiprotons an hour, of which experiments capture about 10%. Run it non-stop for a year with perfect traps and you would collect around 30 million antihydrogen atoms, or 3 × 10⁻²⁰ kg.

Antimatter	How much	Energy or context
A year’s antihydrogen at CERN	about 30 million atoms	a few thousandths of a joule, one phone tap
A year’s antiprotons at CERN	about 300 billion	by CERN’s reckoning roughly 500 joules, a 100-watt bulb for five seconds
A BASE-STEP trap that fails in transit	100 to 1,000 antiparticles	about a millionth of a joule
Fermilab’s lifetime output	some 10¹⁶ antiprotons, about 17 nanograms	more than 90% of all nuclear antimatter humans have made

That last figure comes from a US Department of Energy report. You may also read that a gram would take CERN “100 million years”. That estimate, from CERN physicist Rolf Landua, assumed about 10 nanograms a year. CERN’s current figure for a full year of antiprotons is about 3 × 10⁻¹⁶ kg, a pace at which a single gram would take trillions of years.

What has changed is that antimatter now travels. The BASE collaboration’s portable trap, BASE-STEP, carried antiprotons on a truck for the first time, the start of plans to move them to quieter precision laboratories being built at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. If such a trap failed in transit, CERN estimates the energy released would be around 10,000 times less than a single key press.