Breakthrough in antimatter production
home.cern
home.cern
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).
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.
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.
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.
I am far from a domain expert, I only know of four current and speculated uses for antimatter: energy storage, inducing nuclear reactions, medical imaging, and one specific tumour removal method.
For the first one, antimatter has about 1000x the energy density of fission, but also unlike a fission bomb all of it reacts (with an equal mass of normal matter), which means 1 gram of the stuff is a bigger boom than Fat Man and Little Boy combined.
Fortunately, "15000 antihydrogen atoms" is a factor of 4e19 away from 1 gram, and even if it wasn't we'd probably have to fuse the antihydrogen into antilithium to hold that much in a not completely absurd storage system.
Inducing nuclear reactions might make for some interesting propulsion systems, or might make atomic weapon proliferation even harder to prevent; that's expected at around 10^18 (the microgram level), which is still 1e14 more than announced by CERN — if it works, this use is hypothetical because current production is so much less than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter-catalyzed_nuclear_p...
Medical imaging is already done with positron sources (doesn't need complete antihydrogen atoms), and antiproton beam therapy doesn't need the antiprotons to be turned into antihydrogen at any point: https://home.cern/science/experiments/ace etc.
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.
I remember there was a quote from some sci-fi universe that there's "no such thing as an unarmed space ship".
"A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeaponizedExhaus...
1) It’d be exactly twice as easy but for Tsiolkovsky!
10 more to go!