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Comment by juiceandjuice | Hacker News Reader

Only because the mass to energy conversion is 100%. But, if you factored in the size of whatever object you use to contain the antimatter, then your mass to energy conversion is probably comparable to a hydrogen bomb. Further, factor in the the energy required to contain the antimatter and it seems like it's losing proposition, probably until you start to approach the size of a small house or larger.

So then the argument turns into critical mass vs. critical structure mass.

Anyways, the technique they used is much more interesting than the fact that it's antimatter. Of course, CERN still has to play the PR game too just like anybody else, and I don't fault them for that.

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The "object you use to contain the antimatter" is not very large, it can be wheeled around in a lab. The "energy required to contain the antimatter" is not very significant, liquid helium cooled inside a liquid nitrogen shell, and some rather ordinary (in terms of power usage) electric and magnetic fields. 100 grams of antimatter has a yield similar to a 4 megaton hydrogen bomb.

A 4 megaton thermonuclear warhead can be crammed into shockingly little space and weight, the question is whether the antimatter containment device can be smaller and lighter.

However, the real benefit to using anti-matter in munitions would be as a catalyst, not necessarily as a primary source of energy.

Consider a conventional multi-stage thermonuclear weapon, conventional explosives compress a fission primary bomb which goes off and serves as an x-ray light-bulb inside a radiation channel to provide ablative compression of the fusion secondary which, with the aid of a fission bomb "spark plug" ignites a self-sustaining fusion reaction. If you had significant quantities of anti-matter available you could change this design significantly. In the simplest design you could replace the primary with perhaps a single gram or less of anti-matter. Saving significant amounts of weight and also possibly allowing for much smaller thermonuclear weapons. More so, it may be possible with anti-matter to completely remove the need for fissile components in thermonuclear warheads. This could be useful in civilian applications (in an Orion drive spacecraft, for example).

Actually, the real benefit to using anti-matter in munitions is that it's a hell of a cash cow. Nobody expects it to actually work or ever be used, but you get paid a fortune anyways. Everyone wins -- the air force general gets a staff of 40 to manage the project, and the defense contractor gets several hundred million dollars.

But the question is what kind of infrastructure is needed to to contain 100 grams of positrons? There's no way you've contained 1/1000th of that amount otherwise you wouldn't be telling us about it on the internet (assuming you have Q/Top Secret clearance)

Also, assuming it is positrons, I'd imagine you might also have to worry slightly about relativistic background electrons and gamma rays/pair production, unless you're under 10ft+ of concrete. The extremely rare case that a 10^19 eV cosmic ray hits you head on sounds like an awesome way to possibly produce a spontaneous "detonation", or when some jokester thinks it's awesome to point a LINAC right at you.

There's no way you've contained 1/1000th of that amount otherwise you wouldn't be telling us about it on the internet (assuming you have Q/Top Secret clearance)

If he has one now, he won't have it for much longer at this rate.

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