5 ms·
Breakthrough in antimatter production
- pfdietz 1y agoIt increases the rate of production of neutral antihydrogen from antiprotons and positrons by a factor of 8. It doesn't increase the efficiency of production of antiprotons, which is the extremely inefficient, energy intensive part.
- throwawayqqq11 1y agoThe output got increased by a factor of 8, did the energy consuption increase proportionately? If not, its an efficiency gain.
- tsimionescu 1y agoIf you have a process where it takes 5MW to produce one component and 80KW to convert that component into the final product, and you increase the efficiency of the second step 8 times so it only takes 10KW, that's real and awesome, but still almost irrelevant to the overall efficiency of the process. I have no idea what the actual numbers are, just stating the general concept.
- XorNot 1y agoConversely efficiency is a lot less important if it unlocks capability you otherwise don't have at all. Antimatter is a unique element: nothing else can do what it does. The game changer would be producing industrially useful amounts for further experimentation. (Antimatter chemistry would be incredibly interesting and quite possibly a practical way to actually use antimatter - shoot the beam into a reaction or solid matrix to do interesting reactions due to the electronic properties before it annihilates).
- tsimionescu 1y agoThis article is about an efficiency gain, not about any new source of antimatter or any newly discovered property or reaction. And, getting industrial levels will require massive efficiency gains, so we're back to this discussion.
- XorNot 1y agoIt's about a production rate increase, not an efficiency gain.
- SiempreViernes 1y agoThey cut production time to a given number of anti-atoms from 10 weeks to 7 hours by improving the electron cooling, just from this fact it is a bit rich to insist the anti-proton generation is the limiting factor. Going to the paper itself we can observe that the CERN Antiproton Decelerator can deliver 10^7 antiprotons every 2 minutes. Remembering it previously took 10 weeks to capture 10^4 anti-atoms, I hope you forgive me for not agreeing that the antiproton generation is the source of important inefficiencies.
- emmavis 1y agoIn simple terms for humanists, does that brings us closer in anyway to scifi engines?:)
- Ygg2 1y agoNo. Unless you find a chunk of antimatter or a way to break the laws of physics.
- lolive 1y agoIsn't it the path to a yet deadlier bomb ? #alwaysLookOnTheBrightSideOfLife
- GCUMstlyHarmls 1y agoJust be-fore you draw your terminal breath ♫
- YouAreWRONGtoo 1y ago[dead]
- lazide 1y agoIn all (realistic) interplanetary space travel - not to mention interstellar - the difference between the largest bomb/death ray anyone has ever experienced and a better drive, is purely a matter of where you aim it and when/how you throttle it up. The most hilarious part of the expanse for instance is how they didn’t really use their actual drives as weapons even in CQB, which is quite a waste! Not actually that different for rockets now, frankly, we just usually don’t operate direct nuclear fission/fusion drives right now for this very reason and our own sense of self preservation. There certainly are plans on the drawing board! It would take 23 grams of antimatter to produce the effect of a 1 megaton nuclear bomb, and the biggest factor stopping someone is both production of the matter itself (improving) and actual shielding technology (magnetic bottles good enough to effectively trap that much antimatter are huge and extremely energy consuming right now - much bigger than a fusion bomb of equivalent power). Theoretically, it should be possible to store that much in a thermos bottle, however. We just need better superconductor technology.
- aeve890 1y agoWhat are the civilian applications?
- gradschool 1y agoThat cloud of laser-cooled beryllium ions would probably be great for overclocking.
- secult 1y agoPET scan (You have to wait for civic applications of the newly discovered technologies for a while, but the "technology transfer" from CERN to practical applications has a few notable examples.)
- joelthelion 1y agoPET doesn't use antimatter, at least it doesn't use it directly. It uses regular radioactive tracers.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Romain_Winler 1y agoPET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. The radioactive tracers emit positrons (antimatter), which then annihilate with electrons to produce the gamma rays that are detected. So it does use antimatter, just indirectly through the decay process.
- joelthelion 1y agoI am familiar with PET. As we both agree, PET does not use antimatter directly, so this article is irrelevant to it (which is what the original comment was asking about).
- secult 1y agoIndeed, it would be quite difficult to smuggle some antimatter to a tumor. I'm saying that research in this particular area eventually led to practical application, PET scans.
- nubinetwork 1y agoAnd what do we do with it? This isn't star trek, I can't just go shove this into my warp drive and blast off... /shrug
- alansaber 1y agoThese intermediate steps are important to the development of new technologies
- thot_experiment 1y agoNow we can make a firecracker's worth of antimatter (by annihilation energy) in a mere two hundred thousand years of continuous production. Super cool stuff though, pun intended.
- bogdanos 1y agoI just finished Angels and Demons ffs
- hakkikonu 1y agoNature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65085-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65085-4