4 ms·
What are the civilian applications?
by aeve890 11mo ago
What are the civilian applications?
- gradschool 11mo agoThat cloud of laser-cooled beryllium ions would probably be great for overclocking.
- secult 11mo 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 11mo agoPET doesn't use antimatter, at least it doesn't use it directly. It uses regular radioactive tracers.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Romain_Winler 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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.
- ben_w 11mo agoQuite difficult, but also already in experiment: https://home.cern/science/experiments/ace https://home.cern/science/experiments/ace
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- contravariant 11mo agoNone for the foreseeable future I hope.
- fragmede 11mo agoWhy is that? I must have missed the episode of black mirror you watched that would make that a bad thing.
- contravariant 11mo agoWell what is the most obvious application of a highly volatile energy dense substance? This substance can basically only do two things. 1) whatever ordinary hydrogen can 2) explode violently on contact with matter Sure it's interesting to test 1) from a physics research point of view, but 2) is the only practical application that I know of.
- Hendrikto 11mo agoPropulsion with antimatter drives is another application. That’s not consumer-facing though.
- fragmede 11mo agoAs a luddite, when I get in to my car to drive to work, I harness the power of several hundred violent explosions per minute in order for my non-science fiction car to get to work. If I had a homelab sized source of anti-matter violent explosions, youtube university in this hypothetical universe could help me harness it into something that generates electricity or something fun and useful, and not for killing people.
- ben_w 11mo agoIf your car suffers a catastrophic exothermic event with its fuel, that looks like a car fire. If the same energy explodes as antimatter, to the extent that it is not radiation shielded what you get is a pulse of high-energy ionising radiation*; while to the extent that it is radiation shielded, it looks like order-of as many kg of TNT as the number of kWh stored, give or take. * with a note that 10 joules of absorbed energy per kg of body mass is "if you're lucky you will fall into a coma and die in about a week, if you're unlucky you'll be conscious", and that 1 litre of ICE fuel ~= 10 kWh = 36 megajoules.
- SiempreViernes 11mo agoPerforming precision tests of fundamental physics by verifying that antimatter behaves as predicted by standard theory.
- gostsamo 11mo agoif produced in BIG enough quantities, very small reactors. As far as AM cannot be mined, but only produced at high price, currently it would matter only for deep space and bombs where we have RTG-s for deep space.
- ReptileMan 11mo agoSlow annihilating weapons that boil water that goes trough turbines.