Comment by fsh
16 hours ago
The antiproton decelerator at CERN has been operational for 25 years, and they have plenty of smart engineers there. Unlike in the 1940s, the underlying physics has been well understood for many decades. I would argue that nuclear fission is the counter example that happens to be surprisingly easy to do.
CERN is trying to do fundamental physics, not trying to weaponize antimatter. If/when it comes to that, the pace will pick up.
Also, 25 years to the breakthrough discussed in the article seems like a reasonably good pace.
All experiments at the AD are strongly limited by the low rates. If there was a straightforward way to improve this by many orders of magnitude, they would have done it a long time ago.