Anti-matter researches

[saidevo]

Dan Brown, in his novel "Angels and Demons" talks about laboratory formation and extraction of anti-matter, which is later used as a weapon. Is it real, or only fiction? What is the current status of anti-matter of researches?

 

saidevo

[GAHD]

I find it hard to beleive it exists. Like alchemist's gold.

[sanctus]

At CERN they actually created anti-matter, but surely not in any remarkable quantity if I remember right a couple of thousands of atoms.

And the enrgy used to create and keep that anti-matter is much bigger than the one one would get by matter anti-matter annihilation so to use it as a weapon is far away from realisation (luckily).

But there is still a big research made on anti-matter at CERN.

[CraigD]

Anti-matter is real. Very small quantities of it – a mass equivalent to a few thousand hydrogen atoms – has been produced by several particle accelerators, stored, and used in various research.

 

Although anti-particles (positrons = anti-electrons and anti-protons) have been produced and detected for over 50 years, the technology required to slow (cool) these particles enough to store them is recent – the mid 1990s, I recall. Actually being able to combine positrons and anti-protons to make anti-hydrogen (and then being able to keep it from coming into contact and annihilating with ordinary matter) is a real achievement!

 

The amount of anti-matter necessary to make a bomb like the one in “Angels and Demons” substantially exceeds existing quantities. His description of antimatter having a weird appearance is fictional – anti-atoms of any element, compound, or mixture interact with photons indistinguishable from normal matter, so it wouldn’t look unusual. Because antimatter must be kept at very low temperatures – within a few degrees of absolute zero – to prevent it from overwhelming its containment system and colliding with the ordinary matter of its container, allowing visible light into such a container would, I think, be a bad idea, akin to opening a cooler to make sure the ice isn’t melting.

 

I strongly recommend the late Robert Forward’s non-fictional ”Indistinguishable From Magic” http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671876864/102-9074324-1710545 for its speculation on future antimatter technology. In it, Forward notes that, at the current cost of production, antimatter is the most expensive substance existent (something like US$ 1,000,000,000,000/gram!), then proceeds to suggest that special accelerators designed just for antimatter production, rather than research, might be able to reduce the cost to only thousands of time or less than energy equivalents in conventional technologies such as batteries and petroleum, and describe wonderful applications in spaceflight engineering such as single stage manned vehicles capable of rapid travel to Mars, asteroids, and moons of the outer planets.

[Qfwfq]

Look up CERN's ISR (Intersecting Storage Rings) that they've been using to store beams of various particles since long before the '90s. Working on my grad thesis, I had to study an analysis, done in the '80s, of experimental data of hadron diffractive scattering from there, also involving antiprotons.

[CraigD]

Although anti-particles (positrons = anti-electrons and anti-protons) have been produced and detected for over 50 years, the technology required to slow (cool) these particles enough to store them is recent – the mid 1990s, I recall

Look up CERN's ISR (Intersecting Storage Rings) that they've been using to store beams of various particles since long before the '90s.

I concur (and envy Qfwfq his thesis work involving such data :) ).

 

I factually erred in stating that the storage of antiparticles had not been accomplished until the 1990s. The history I was recalling is actually as follows:

• 1955, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – antiprotons created by colliding protons with copper target, but not stored
  
• 19??, Fermi National Laboratory – antiprotons stored in cyclotron rings for durations greater than 1 minute
  
• 1992, CERN – ATRAP group cools antiprotons enough (< 1 K ?) to store them in charged particle (Penning) trap
  
• 1995, CERN – antiproton beam crossed with zenon atom beam to create and detect 9 atoms of very hot antihydrogen
  
• 1998, FermiLab – similar process creates and detects 57 antihydrogen atoms
  
• 2002, CERN - ATHENA group creates, cools and stores thousands of antihydrogen atoms
  
• ca. 2004, CERN – ATRAP groups able to store about 500,000 antiprotons without measurable loss for 2 months.
  

I excerpted this history entirely from ”Making Cold Antimater”, 6/2005 Scientific American (subscription required for full article).

 

The impression I’ve gotten from various sources is that storing enough antimatter to generate energy for engineering purposes will require very cold antiatoms. Very cold Antiprotons alone, with a net + charge, cannot be stored densely enough.

 

:lol: What bothered me in Dan Brown’s novel “Angels and Demons,” is that he depicts the creation and storage of atomic antimatter as something achieved in secret by a single researcher and assistant, in defiance of conventional theory and research direction. While this makes for exciting reading, it paints an inaccurate picture of how scientific research really happens.

[Qfwfq]

I concur (and envy Qfwfq his thesis work involving such data :lol: ).

Don't envy it too much! A few months after graduating I quit trying to understand what the devil I had been doing. :) :D

[InfiniteNow]

Matter and antimatter are pretty much exactly the same. If we lived in a world composed of "anti-matter" we wouldn't see anything differently. We'd just call "matter" "antimatter" instead.

 

Hawking said something relatively funny. If you ever meet your "anti-self," just don't shake hands or touch. If you did, you'd both instantaneously stop existing...

[TheBigDog]

Hawking said something relatively funny. If you ever meet your "anti-self," just don't shake hands or touch. If you did, you'd both instantaneously stop existing...

Is there any way for me to recognize my anti-self? My first guess was that I was married to her, but we have touched and I am still here.

 

Bill

[BluesMan]

 

Hawking said something relatively funny. If you ever meet your "anti-self," just don't shake hands or touch. If you did, you'd both instantaneously stop existing...

 

And most of the matter around you would be "poof" as well.

[Jay-qu]

I find it hard to beleive it exists. Like alchemist's gold.

You do know that lead can be turned into gold via radioactive decay.. :doh:

[Qfwfq]

True, except that as far as we currently know, it would cost a shade more than five hundred bucks an ounce.

[Jay-qu]

yeah impractical to make money - but non-the-less possible! :doh:

 

apparently there is more gold in the ocean than there is anywhere else in the crust! now if you came up with a cheap and efficient extractor that would be a good souce of income! and it would have to be very effiecient , i just looked it up and its in the order of 13ppt!!

[Qfwfq]

now if you came up with a cheap and efficient extractor that would be a good souce of income!

Good souce of income?

:)

Only if you manage to prevent anybody from finding out your method!