6 ms·
CERN Scientists Trap Antimatter for Almost 17 Minutes
- zitterbewegung 15y agoArticle in nature for the inclined http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys2025.html http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys...
- maeon3 15y agoIf only we could develop a small device (say the size of a briefcase) to convert electricity to antimatter and then slow release antimatter reaction back to electricity. It would make electric vehicles much more economical than oil. We could finally make a ship that could pack enough punch to make a trip to the asteroid belt and back. To bring back the unobtainium.
- reemrevnivek 15y agoThe ability to carry road-trip quantities of antimatter in a briefcase would take the threat of terrorism to a whole new level. How much would you need to take out a plane? A building? A city? Nuclear cars would be cool, too, but I think we need to consider the weaponizable nature (both for governmental military forces and for terrorists) of these technologies.
- silvestrov 15y agoFrom Wikipedia: The reaction of 1 kg of antimatter with 1 kg of matter would produce [...] the rough equivalent of 43 megatons of TNT. For comparison, Tsar Bomb, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, reacted an estimated yield of 50 megatons. I dare say this would take a briefcase bomb to a whole new level. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter#Fuel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter#Fuel
- iwwr 15y agoThere's no way to contain it without big, heavy equipment.
- jws 15y agoThe energy density of antimatter has 9 more zero compared to TNT. So, roughly speaking, a soda bottle of antimatter is a megaton of TNT[1]. Well, half a soda bottle if you ask the stewardess for a soda of non-antimatter once you get on the plane. If you want to equal the largest of nuclear warheads tested, you will have to pay a small overage fee on your luggage. [1] I'm ignoring containment overhead. Once you show me a gram of antimatter we can talk about containment.
- maeon3 15y agoThere will be a scanner on the airport line that would detect antimatter atoms in quantities of more than a few thousand atoms, which is what you would need to create an explosion. So the problem is making it safe enough to not explode even if the electric-antimatter converter is shot, crushed, disintegrated in an explosion or superheated. Bond the anti hydrogen with anti Oxygen, Bond it with an anti-matter noble gas (elements that refuse to react). Maybe there is a creative way to make it hard to unlock into it's explosive state. That way you can only dole out the energy with a complex process that an accident would not recreate.
- danparsonson 15y agoAntimatter will annihilate when it comes into contact with any normal matter; it's not a chemical reaction. You can't make antimatter 'inert' because it's reactivity doesn't depend upon some chemical property (arrangement of anti-electrons for example), but simply on the fact that it's antimatter. Hence the use of magnetic fields for containment since they prevent contact with ordinary matter. Your airport scanner would thus have to infer the presence of antimatter rather than detecting it directly (by looking for high-energy photons), but if your containment vessel is leaking then you have bigger problems than law enforcement :-)
- lwat 15y agoNo it wouldn't make electric vehicles more economic. It takes many orders of magnitude more energy (and thus money) to create and capture antimatter than we'd ever get out of it in your car.
- palish 15y agoRight now it takes many orders of magnitude more energy. When electricity was first being invented for human utility, I bet it took several orders of magnitude more energy to package it than to simply light a candle, for example. Or when candles were first invented, it took several orders of magnitude more energy to create one than to keep a campfire going. Etc. Right now we're at the "invent a candle" stage, and talking about the "hydroelectric dam" stage, so it's hard to imagine. But it's far from impossible.
- ars 15y agoWe are way before even "invent a candle". Creating a candle was at least possible, making antimatter in quantity is currently not.
- jacques_chester 15y agoAntimatter is a terrible store of energy because it is "fail-dangerous". The failure mode is a catastrophic release of energy. The closest comparison for endurance would be nuclear power. Its worst failure mode is meltdown, which while very bad is nothing like as destructive as an AM explosion. And it gets worse! Suppose your AM containment fails in a carpark. The explosion will cause a chain reaction of car explosions. Finally, there is the incredible inefficiency with which AM is manufactured. It takes gigawatts and many hours of accelerator time to create even minute quantities. Because the only way we know of to create AM is smashing things together in particle accelerators. There aren't many LHCs to go around.
- superkarn 15y agoIn the far future, I could see technology advancing enough to where we could efficiently create/manufacture antimatter (e.g. from a star or something). But the "fail-dangerous" issue is more of a user responsibility, and I don't see that being solved anytime before the above technology is discovered (if ever).
- jacques_chester 15y agoPeter F Hamilton surmised in his Night's Dawn trilogy that antimatter would be outlawed, but produced by large accelerators parked close to suns in unoccupied solar systems. It was still heinously inefficient, but the high price of black-market AM justified the cost. Putting speculation aside, we know that AM is fail-dangerous. For all current purposes, we have better alternatives. For long-endurance power sources we have fission. For weapons we have fusion. I cannot personally think of a common use where the statistical certainty of failure outweighs the risk.
- superkarn 15y agoI agree. My knowledge in this domain is quite limited, but maybe someday somebody will figure something out. Just the thought of antimatter existing is very cool.
- 15y ago
- zbanks 15y agoHas anyone heard if they managed to observe the effect of gravity on the particles? The Nature article was vague... I remember hearing that this was one of the reasons why they needed to trap antimatter for observable lengths of time. To my understanding, they aren't completely sure yet which way antimatter "falls."
- foob 15y agoIt will still be a while before this is directly observed. We're fairly sure that it "falls" downwards for a wide range of theoretical reasons and also due to the 1987 observation of gravitational lensing in neutrinos and antineutrinos from a supernova. If we observe the opposite in a lab then it will be incredible because we'll have to reevaluate a lot of what we think we know about physics. If we observe it "falling down" then it will be an important result but not at all revolutionary.
- zbanks 15y agoThanks. I guess it's similar to the whole P != NP issue.
- superkarn 15y ago"falling down" - does that mean gravity is an attractive force between matter-antimatter or antimatter-antimatter (or both)?
- sp332 15y agoAntimatter has opposite electrical charge (and magnetic moment) from normal matter. It should have the exact same mass and interaction with gravity as normal matter. An anti-electron is called a positron because it has a positive charge instead of negative. Antiproton (sometimes called negatron, but rarely) is just a proton with opposite charge. You can even make a hydrogen atom out of an antiproton and a positron, called antihydrogen. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Antihydrogen https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Antihydrogen
- foob 15y ago
- pella 15y agonearly 17 minutes = 1,000 seconds, or 16 minutes and 40 seconds.
- MaxGabriel 15y agoPretty impressive, but still not nearly long enough to survive a trip to the Vatican
- dpcan 15y agoI believe you are thinking of strange matter / strangelets :)
- mason55 15y agoOr maybe just Anti-Popes
- hebejebelus 15y agoAnd we still haven't invented the field of symbology. Looks like it'll be a while until Dan Brown's prophecy comes to pass.
- jeangenie 15y agoany speculation on when the head crabs are coming?
- richbradshaw 15y agoYou need a resonance cascade for that to happen, which so far seems unlikely.