Fortunately the loss of the anti-matter into the wild and the resulting energy release wouldn't trigger a payout on the LorS Capital End-of-the-Universe puts.
From Ars Technica, May 19:
A portable containment device that can be dropped on a truck.
There's a lot of matter around, which ensures that any antimatter produced experiences a very short lifespan. Studying antimatter, therefore, has been extremely difficult. But that's changed a bit in recent years, as CERN has set up a facility that produces and traps antimatter, allowing for extensive studies of its properties, including entire anti-atoms.
Unfortunately, the hardware used to capture antiprotons also produces interference that limits the precision with which measurements can be made. So CERN decided that it might be good to determine how to move the antimatter away from where it's produced. Since it was tackling that problem anyway, CERN decided to make a shipping container for antimatter, allowing it to be put on a truck and potentially taken to labs throughout Europe.
A shipping container for antimatter
The problem facing CERN comes from its own hardware. The antimatter it captures is produced by smashing a particle beam into a stationary target. As a result, all the anti-particles that come out of the debris carry a lot of energy. If you want to hold on to any of them, you have to slow them down, which is done using electromagnetic fields that can act on the charged antimatter particles. Unfortunately, as the team behind the new work notes, many of the measurements we'd like to do with the antimatter are "extremely sensitive to external magnetic field noise."
In short, the hardware that slows the antimatter down limits the precision of the measurements you can take.
The obvious solution is to move the antimatter away from where it's produced. But that gets tricky very fast. The antimatter containment device has to be maintained as an extreme vacuum and needs superconducting materials to produce the electromagnetic fields that keep the antimatter from bumping into the walls of the container. All of that means a significant power supply, along with a cache of liquid helium to keep the superconductors working. A standard shipping container just won't do....
...That is why Long or Short is now offering LHC End of the Universe Puts. It’s a simple put option wherein the buyer retains the right to sell the Universe at a strike price of “Existing”. Based on our Black-Holes model used to value all “end of the world” options, the July 2008 vintage options are currently priced at $20....
Of course all the caveats on collecting your payoffs apply exponentially to existential derivatives:
1) Know your counterparty.
2) Require collateral up front as a condition for entering into the contract.
Finally, be aware that fear/greed/baguettes can whipsaw the price of the instrument quite dramatically.
February 2012
CERN: Light Once Again Faster then Neutrinos, Problem May Have Been a Loose Cable
Don't you hate it when that happens? A bad connection and all of a sudden you're calling Einstein a moron.
From CERN:...
The rehabilitation of the beleaguered Large Hadron Collider was on hold tonight after the failure of one of its powerful cooling units caused by an errant chunk of baguette.
The £4 billion particle-collider faced more than a year of delays after a helium leak stymied the project in its first few days of operation. It is gradually being switched back on over the coming months but suffered a new setback on Tuesday morning.
Scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva noticed that the system’s carefully monitored temperatures were creeping up.
Further investigation into the failure of a cryogenic cooling plant revealed an unusual impediment. A piece of crusty bread had paralysed a high voltage installation that should have been powering the cooling unit.....
