CERN Scientists Trap Antimatter for Almost 17 Minutes
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
Thanks for the link! I wish I could follow it more closely, but overall 'tis interesting stuff.
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."
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.
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
Consider what happens if an object has "negative mass" though. It would be repelled by ordinary matter. OK, simple enough though, right. But then what happens? Well, F = ma right? So the repulsive force would repel ordinary matter, but it would result in an attractive acceleration of the negative mass. Now, if it turned out that gravitational and inertial mass could be different, that would be an incredible result as well.
it offers an explanation for the abundance of matter - if large enough quantities of matter and anti-matter are created, and can gain enough separation, then although the attractive forces of the electromagnetic attraction are strong, the result of gravity repulsing opposite matter types would separate them. so matter/anti-matter creation would be symmetric, but all the anti matter would be beyond the edge of the observable universe.
lets just hope the LHC doesn't create a mini black hole which eats up the planet, before we find out..!
-"Stick Up: Antimatter Atoms Trapped for More Than 15 Minutes" by Scientific American
- "Antimatter Trapped for Amazingly Long 16 Minutes" by Foxnews
-"Scientists hold anti-matter for 17 minutes" by Radioaustralia
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.
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.
I dare say this would take a briefcase bomb to a whole new level.
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.
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.
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 :-)
Scientists would LOVE to find a difference, it would explain so much about the universe.
And no, there is no "creative way to make it hard to unlock into it's [sic] explosive state". Such a thing is impossible. The only thing you can do is make some kind of really good containment.
And BTW a few thousand atoms is not much, even for anti-matter. It's about the energy of a flying mosquito.
If I've got a kilo of antimatter in a briefcase, I'm just going to set it off at the scanner then, killing the ~10k people in the airport... and half the city it's part of.
1Kg of antimatter is about the energy of the Tsar Bomba if you want to try it out: http://www.carloslabs.com/node/16
Surely as scientists we could take some comfort in the statistics of the likelihood of any one of us actually experiencing "terrorism" first hand....
I can also buy any type of "missle" (read vehicle).
I can also buy fertilizer, cheaply.
Say I forego the fertilizer route, and fill my car full of gasoline. Now, all I need to is then put a rag in the gas intake and break off the tab. I have a molotov cartail, that, when steered does a lot of damage.
It's easy to kill people and cause terror. Moreso, if you are an engineer. But its decency and ethics that keep people from doing these sort of things.
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.
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).
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
The Tsar Bomb test was restricted to 50Mt by missing out the 3rd stage - so it was primarily a fusion device. Had the depleted uranium tamper been in place it would have given the 100Mt the design was capable of - but with horrific fall-out.
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.
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.