• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Anti-Matter / Antimatter: Production

Is producing aniti-matter a good idea

  • Yes - to infinity and beyond

    Votes: 1 20.0%
  • Yes - but not in our lifetime

    Votes: 2 40.0%
  • It'll all come out in the wash

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • No - too dangerous

    Votes: 2 40.0%
  • Not possible economically

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    5

intaglio

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Oct 14, 2001
Messages
1,585
The following article implys that Anti-matter production is being actively persued. Given that it is a wonderfully compact way of storing energy it is essential to spaceflight or knowing how the military can use anything that goes bang. The question is "Is this a good idea??

report at Space.com
Link is dead.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Storing energy more efficiently also means bigger explosions if it leaks out. One gram of antimatter is enough to make a new Hiroshima.
 
What would you actually keep antimatter in ? If it was made of matter it would explode .
 
On the Enterprise they keep it in an antimatter containment field. How is force field technology going in the real world?
 
Marion said:
What would you actually keep antimatter in ? If it was made of matter it would explode .

Magnetic Fields

Niles "Bucket Head" Calder
 
What worries me, as any PET scan will prove :D , is if a sandgrain sized peice of anti-iron could be made you could handily keep it in a bullet sized, rare earth magnet containment bottle. I have visions of a handgun that could blow up a house or small village.
 
Wednesday, 18 September, 2002, 19:51 GMT 20:51 UK
Antimatter is mass-produced


Radiation from a cloud of antihydrogen atoms



By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor


Physicists have mass produced antimatter, a crucial first step towards precision studies of its properties that may help solve one of the greatest mysteries of the Universe.


This one is a big step

David Christian
Antihydrogen has been made before, but only a handful of atoms at a time.

Now, the Cern particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, has produced more than 50,000.

Antimatter is the mirror image of ordinary matter and both should have been created in equal quantities at the birth of the Universe. That everything around is predominantly ordinary matter is therefore a major puzzle.

Cern is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

Pool of positrons

"This is a milestone that has opened up new horizons, to enable scientists to study symmetry in nature and explore the fundamental laws of physics which govern the Universe," said Professor Michael Charlton University of Wales at Swansea.


Keeping the experiment going

In the latest experiment, researchers used the Cern accelerator to create antiprotons and trapped them in a vacuum chamber.

A radioactive source, meanwhile, was used to create positrons, which were held in a separate trap. The antiprotons were then fed into the pool of positrons, where the two combined to form antihydrogen.

The antimatter was short-lived being destroyed when it bumped into normal matter. Detectors picked up the unique radiation signatures of antimatter as it was annihilated.

Early stages

For years researchers have wanted to create significant amounts of antimatter to test the so-called Standard Model, which describes fundamental particles and their interactions.

Such a test is important because if antihydrogen does not behave the same way as normal hydrogen "the textbooks would have to be rewritten", says Cern's Jeffrey Hangst.

Antimatter is destroyed whenever it collides with matter, turning both into bursts of radiation. Scientists believe this process was crucial in the earliest stages of the Universe billions of years ago.

Today, the Universe consists of predominantly one form of matter and scientists are not sure why this is so.

Praise and doubt

David Christian of Fermilab in the US praised Cern's achievement.

"They've got a lot more big steps they need to make, but this one is a big step," he said.

However, not everyone is convinced by the latest research which has been published in the journal Nature.

Even within Cern, there are questions being raised. A spokesman for a rival research group said he doubted that antihydrogen had been produced in the latest experiment.

Harvard physicist Gerald Gabrielse said: "Our long experience with these very difficult experiments warns that antihydrogen may not have really been produced."

He added that upcoming publications by his group "will show how it is possible to be fooled".

Any thoughts of using antimatter to power a starship or create a weapon is still in the realm of science fiction.

Making antiprotons requires 10 billion times more energy than it produces. For example, the antimatter produced each year at Cern could power a 100 watt light bulb for just 15 minutes.
 
Did!
Didn't!

The sniping and whingeing has already begun.

But this is good, because this is the scientific method. You have to perform an experiment not just to your own satisfaction, but so that you can convince doubters and rivals.
Making antiprotons requires 10 billion times more energy than it produces. For example, the antimatter produced each year at Cern could power a 100 watt light bulb for just 15 minutes.
So it doesn't look as if well be building an anti-matter powered Enterprise starship just yet. Pity :(
 
So it doesn't look as if well be building an anti-matter powered Enterprise starship just yet.
Not as long as the international oil cartel is so powerful, anyway!
 
What worries me, as any PET scan will prove :D , is if a sandgrain sized peice of anti-iron could be made you could handily keep it in a bullet sized, rare earth magnet containment bottle. I have visions of a handgun that could blow up a house or small village.

Anti matter annihilation doesn't work that way. One atom of anti matter would only destroy one atom of matter, and not everything.
 
Anti matter annihilation doesn't work that way. One atom of anti matter would only destroy one atom of matter, and not everything.
The energy liberated by the matter/antimatter reaction would possibly "blow up a house"
 
I'd have to be convinced of that. There would be a large flux of gamma rays but nothing substantial. The radiation dose would be substantial though if enough atoms and anti-atoms annihilated.
 
The energy liberated by the matter/antimatter reaction would possibly "blow up a house"
From just one atom of each type? I did wonder.
That would make the perfect space drive, if only it didn't unleash the gamma rays.
 
The energy released by one atom of each annihilating is miniscule.
I'd have to check, but I think proton- anti proton annihilations release pions (along with other stuff too) - the pions soon decay to other products.
 
You'd need about a trillion atoms of antimatter to boil the water for a cup of tea, which is actually a very tiny amount.

Here's a paper about speculative methods of antimatter production,
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0507125
I was inspired by that paper to write this page about a (totally fictional) method of mass production of antimatter.
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/45f0c79d13c29
I doubt it would work exactly as described, but the basic idea is probably sound; first, emigrate to the planet Mercury; second, collect vast amounts of sunlight; third, use that power to make tiny but non-trivial amounts of antimatter.
 
Even a trillion would be hard to create.

If I had the time to do so, I'd check that this amount would boil a cup of tea. I suspect this is a huge underestimate.
 
Orders of magnitude only
Mass of 1 atom of hydrogen ~ 10^-27 kg
Energy = mass x 10^16 = 10^-11 J
One trillion = 10^12
Total energy = 10 Joules

It takes 10^3 joules to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1 kelvin/1 degree C.
 
Back
Top