Golden Jubilee photos: Gathering Antimatter

One day, antimatter might take people where no one has gone before, but it isn't science fiction.
Protons are easily obtainable by stripping electrons from hydrogen atoms, but their antimatter counterparts, the antiprotons, have to be created artificially at accelerators. Roughly one antiproton can be produced from around a million protons bombarding a target at 26 GeV.
In 1978, when CERN decided to take the unprecedented step of turning the SPS accelerator into a proton-antiproton collider, it had to deal with the scarcity, and had to concentrate the beam until it was intense enough for the experiment. Antiprotons are produced with a wide range of angles and energy, so before they can be used in an accelerator they have to be captured and 'cooled', reducing the beam dimensions by many orders of magnitude.
This was the job of the Antiproton Accumulator (AA), completed in 1980 and shown here before it disappeared from view under concrete shielding. It followed the pioneering Initial Cooling Experiment (ICE) in 1978, using Simon van der Meer's 'stochastic cooling' ideas which facilitated the creation of beams of antiprotons of sufficient quantity and density.
Stochastic cooling was extensively used in the AA in creating and storing the antiprotons (and sending them to the SPS Collider), which led to the historic discovery in 1983 of the W and Z particles, carriers of the weak nuclear force.