So we could use this within our warp core to power our warp field generators?
How much energy would we have to expend to separate the positron from the electron and keep them separated? What does that give us in terms of energy storage efficiency, compared to storing electrical charge within a lithium battery?
Then again, I'm not sure I understand the experiment, for example, I'm not sure how a blackbody spectrum helps in the breit-wheeler process. I think that the light colliding at a perpendicular incidence helps, but other than that, I can't see how the spectrum of radiation matters...like how is using a blackbody spectrum is better than, say, a monochromatic laser? I think I'd have to look at the paper once it gets out.
And we've got to power the warp field with something, so what are our most energy-dense options?
The most energy to mass ratio is antimatter, which is why it is chosen as the substance for Star Trek TNG to power the warp core.
Second place is helium-3 if you count helium-3 fusion.
Not that we have any applications for it with the current production efficiency.
This is a book from 1988 by a favorite author Robert L Forward (the worst author from which I regularly bought books in hardcover; I just read them for the physics).
http://books.google.ro/books/about/Mirror_matter.html?id=GS4...
It was based on his report for NASA. I read the review: "He took the giggle factor out of antimatter"(!).
The main point was that if machines were built to create antimatter (instead of Nobel prizes), it wasn't so crazy to produce.
But as people are explaining to you, storage [of "large" masses like microgram] is still not solved. Afaik, at least.
You could (in principle) keep positrons and antiprotons together in a very hot plasma under magnetic confinement, but every pair that binds together into a neutral hydrogen atom can immediately escape and annihilate - turning carefully-stored fuel into gamma rays...
No, the hard part is creating the anti-matter in the first place and then cooling it down to a reasonable temperature at which it can be stored. All of our mechanisms for creating anti-matter generate anti-particles traveling at fantastic, highly relativistic speeds (and also consume much, much more energy to create then they contain in mass energy). Cooling them down without loosing them all to annihilation is very difficult. But once they're cool, it's not so bad.
I suppose the cooling is electromagnetic, the whole process must be really difficult! Cool it while keeping those atoms from interacting from stray particles if the vacuum isn't perfect.
| When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.