To help appreciate the difficulty: Antimatter can only be created from matter by smashing it together with enough energy to spontaneously produce matter-antimat

To help appreciate the difficulty: Antimatter can only be created from matter by smashing it together with enough energy to spontaneously produce matter-antimatter pairs (more or less). The amount of energy to create an antiproton is about a billion electron volts, while the binding energy to split a hydrogen atom (or antiatom) apart is just 13 electron volts. So you have to cram this fantastic amount of energy into individual particles, then cool them down by 8 orders of magnitude without touching them (to avoid annihilating them).