Honey, I shrunk the vacuum chambers!

It takes a lot of work to achieve nothingness. The beam pipes within particle accelerators are some of the emptiest regions in the universe. They are evacuated so as to prevent the accelerating particles from colliding with gas molecules in their path. The extreme vacuums inside these pipes are achieved by pumping out all the gasses within them and then coating their insides with layers of a special material called a "getter" to which stray molecules stick. A team from CERN's vacuum group has re...