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Antimatter Atoms Captured
Whamo writes: "Researchers at CERN think they have created and stored thousands of antiatoms in a particle trap. The researchers first used powerful magnetic fields to trap antiprotons then exposed this to a beam of positrons. Initial results indicate that at least some of the antiparticles have bound together to become neutral antihydrogen atoms. How cool is that?"
Well, that would depend on how fast the anti-hydrogen atoms are moving, wouldn't it?
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Well, how does this matter?
*grin*
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
"Researchers at CERN think they have created and stored thousands of antiatoms in a particle trap."
:)
Ok, they THINK they have? How can you tell?
IAECOTT--I am extremely clueless on this topic, so please someone out there give a newbie a little help with this....
thanks, and I hope to god I am not the only clueless one on this subject here.
Sent from your iPad.
Pardon my stupidity on the subject, but what exactly does an ANTI-hydrogen atom do? Is a particular application of this type of knowledge useable such as radioactive waste disposal or something? *clueless*
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
The research, which was sponsored by the RIAA, has initiated talks with the trapped atoms, but unfortunately refused to let them go free until they pay their proper licensing fees.
--It's Pimptastic!--
Hmm, if we combine anti-hydrogen and anti-oxygen then we could make anti-water! A new sports drink for the new millenium...
No todo lo que es oro brilla
Last time I heard about any "really new" developments in antimatter, they were just figuring out how to contain 10-100 protons (circa 1992) (I know, I'm dating myself, whatever. :-) This is really cool news.
Still, even a million atoms is really physically small. I wonder
Anyway, just my $0.01. :-)
---NEW! Crash Windows NT/2000/XP from any account using only printf!
I know that the dept tag is supposed to be funny, but the real benefit of this research is insight into very powerful propulsion systems. No? Not very sustainable at our current rate but definitely the next step toward reaching deeply into space.
Of course, anti-matter engines are waaaaaaaay off, but I think that we should see from the next-stop-Crab-Nebula dept. rather than from the I-frag-way-too-much dept.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
The theory goes that anti-hyrdogen should have all the same observable physical properties that hydrogen does. If we can start to manufacturer and store non-trivial quantities of the stuff we can actually start to test whether or not this is true. We can see if it has the same obsorbtion spectrum as hydrogen, the same atomic weight, etc...
If there is a difference we might be able to use it to confirm or disprove our assumption that the entire universe is made of 'normal' matter. For example, if there is an observable difference between the absorbtion spectra of hydrogen and anti-hydrogen, we'd have a test to determine if a distant galaxy was made of anti-matter. If there is no difference, well, we've found a very expensive way to heat a small cup of coffee.
-josh
I believe the article mentions that the potential energy that could be released would not be enough to even "warm up a cup of coffee."
Yummy on Cheerios.
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Around 9:30 last night a burrowing squirrel shorted out electrical lines causing an initial power surge followed by a blackout.
Experts believe that researchers had the magnetic containment field generators connected to a household UPS, which proved unable to keep the field in place.
The result of the containment failure has been described as being very similar to that of a "collapsing hrung." Unfortunately nobody has been able to identify what a hrung is, nor why one should choose to collapse on the CERN facility.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
If an antimatter galaxy collided with this galaxy that'd ruin your whole day, wouldn't it?
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If it did have negative gravitic mass, that would have all kinds of funky consequences. Maybe we could stabilize wormholes, and get faster-than-light travel and time travel. Fun to think about, anyway.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
......one of the first things some scientist did after they managed to do capture the stuff was suddenly yell "Antimatter containment is failing! We're gonna have to eject the core!!!!!!!!" before falling to the floor laughing hysterically?
You know there has to be someone, somewhere who is just dying to be the first person to say that.
It's lukewarm. Didn't you read the article?
Seriously though, we're never going to power a warp drive with that. And let's face it, that's what we really care about, right? So we can all become starship engineers, get neat uniforms, and boldy go and score with hot alien chicks.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Alright AM freaks, I must admit this is one of the cooles things Ive read on Slashdot in a long time. Certainly one of the most important happenings in the particle physics world for a while IMHO.
Now, unfortunatley they said they dont even have enough to warm a cup of coffee, How long before weapons research in the US grbs ahold of this ? Or have they already.
To me this is akin to the first sussefull refinment of weapons grade Plutonium and Uranium.
Unfortunatley at the moment it requires too much enery to be usefull as an energy storage medium, but could be really cool for Interstellar travel,
NOW My question, Will Anti-Hydrogen react with say Normal Lithium to create energy or will its positron shell react with at a minimum the elecrton shell of the Lithium ?
If it dosent , storage should be easier than the trap they are now using,
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Make nuclear proliferation seem like peanuts if the next Mr. Coffee can start a chain reaction that ends the universe.
With or without cream.
the universe has brought suit against the estate of Albert Einstein, claiming that fission is illegal under the DMCA, and that fair use of elementary particles applies only to cold fusion.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The theory goes that anti-hyrdogen should have all the same observable physical properties that hydrogen does.
I can't wait until they drop some of the anti-hydrogen atoms to whether they fall down or fall up.
Positron and antiprotons are charged and weigh almost nothing, so electromagnetic forces on them are waaay larger than gravity and you can't really tell if they fall up or down.
I know current wisdon is that antimatter will fall down... but wouldn't it be cool if the anti-matter fell up, essentially having a negative gravitational "charge"
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
The article stated that the amount of heat emitted if these antimatter atoms encountered matter wouldn't heat a cup of coffee, before any of the more panicky readers of /. start expecting the end of the world
These were only some hundred atoms, nothing more. Even if they did collide with matter, the damage would not be any worse than if you put a Windows XP CD-Rom into your nuker. Remember, they created those anti-atoms, and conservation of energy dictates that the annihilation of said anti-atoms cannot release any more energy than was needed to create them in the first place.
Say no to software patents.
Trapping and storing animatter is the first necessary step for utilizing it as an energy source. It wouldn't make much sense to use it planetside as it takes more energy to generate it than it would provide for us, but for space vehicles it would be invaluable.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
First, the method they are using to create the antiparticles is rather inefficient...I believe the proportion of energy expended vs energy stored in antiparticles is something on the order of 10^4.
A far more efficient method involves concentrating an intense pulse of light into a small enough space, to the point that the energy actually becomes matter. This has been demonstrated.
With efficient free electron lasers, it may be possible to mass produce antimatter on a large scale in this manner, making possible a greater number of experiments, as well as allowing manned interplanetary expeditions (and in theory interstellar).
Antimatter would make an excellent weapon in addition, since one would have the equivalent of a nuke that could be used on very small scales. You could in theory use it to make, say, antitank bullets that could be fired from a handheld gun. No heavy isotope decay products would be left to contaminate the battlefield, thus avoiding the nastiest side effect of nuclear bombs.
The big problem with antimatter annihilation, however, is that the energy released comes out in the form of high energy gamma rays. While the energy is there, it is difficult to harness in a practical device, and in the weapon example the gamma rays might irradiate everyone on the battlefield including the wielder of the weapon while doing little actual damage to the tank.
Finally, doing large scale chemistry experiments using antimatter versions of the elements could be rather dangerous...you'd probably need a kilo or more of the stuff, which would have rather catastrohpic results if it were allowed to interact with normal matter.
Fortunately, the researchers at CERN probably were physics majors, so they knew that while, yes, when antimatter collides with matter and disappears it releases (comparatively) huge amounts of energy, they only have a few thousand atoms collected together in their trap.
If you remember anything form high-school physics, you'll know that's not many.
Or, as the researcher interviewed put it, "you would get only a tiny amount of energy by combining the antimatter with matter--not even enough to warm a small cup of coffee."
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
From Sir Ernest Rutherford's speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1933:
Do they have an UPS on that particle trap?
--Charlie
So you can use a magnetic field to trap positrons and/or antiprotons, because they have a charge, but when they form antihydrogen they become neutral. How, exactly, do you store a neutral molecule of antimatter? My understanding is the pennig trap doesn't work this way.
--
grep "xercist"
Pretty damn cool, until bearded, evil versions of ourselves start popping up all over the place.
It hurts when I pee.
You can't get more energy out of the system than you put into it. They used energy to create these antiparticles, so they know how much would be created if they came in contact with normal matter.
--
grep "xercist"
Call it Mony?
No, I can promise you that this cost them a pile more energy to make then they would ever get out. It might be good for space travel since we could store lots of energy made on Earth in a small area on a spacecraft. If you want 'free' energy, I'd be waiting for fusion, but don't hold your breath.
Now that anti-hydrogen is so easily made, I just have to wait until they make anti-oxygen too. Combine them to make anti-H2O, and when I drink it it'll make thirsty...
I'm sorry, how do two things of the same polarity bind together to form neutral polarity?
positron = positively charged electron
anti-proton = negatively charged proton
positron + anti-proton = neutral anti-hydrogen
energy released: (Energy is released when an antimatter particle comes in contact with it's opposite particle) e- + e+ (electron plus a positron) releases rougly 1.022MeV of energy
a proton plus an antiproton releases 2 * 938 MeV or 3 * 10^-10 joules per reaction. (The energy is released as photons)
The problem with detecting them is that light and anti light are identical.
Now lets see what energy of 1kg of protons woudl release: 1kg * 1proton/(1.67*10^-24 gm) = 5.69*10^26 protons
5.69*10^26 protons * 3*10^010 J/(proton reaction) = 1.78 * 10^17 J or about 50 billion Kilowatts
I do security
Yeah yeah, but we won't go anywhere if we can't get some dilithium crystals captain!
From CERN toys! Antihydrogen kit! Some assembly required.
Contents: 1 antiproton, 1 positron. 1 magnetic bottle.
WARNING: Contents are volatile.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
The hot water tap here at work isn't quite hot enough to make decent tea; I was thinking it would be nice if there were something you could just add to heat the water with no waste product.
Sodium was all I could think of, and obviously a bad idea for several reasons, but some anti-water ought to work nicely!
... how many terajoules will it take to make those kilos of antihydrogenatoms in the first place??..
oops..
I remember reading an article a few years back on scientists combining anti-protons and anti-electrons to make anti-electrons. At the time they were still playing with the data they got, but the figured they made about 12 anti-atoms.
These guys are interesting in that they actually got the stuff to hold still for a while.
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
I can see it now. Our first Anti-Hydrogen space ship explodes upon landing, so we switch to Anti-Helium, because it's safer. ;-)
Jonathan
Can anyone sum up how much power it takes to create a gram of antimatter? And how much power would a gram of antimater give when it collides with regular matter?
Remember E=mc^2 ? So, since you have 1 mass being antimatter and other mass being regular matter, and they both annihilate each other into energy wouldn't the output energy be
E = kc^2
where,
k = Mass of Antimatter + Mass of Regular matter
So, in the future, even if it costs us 1.9999999 units of energy to create 1 unit of energy worth of antimatter, we would be annihilating it with normal matter (with costs nothing). Then the result would be 2 units of energy. The surplus energy would be minimal (0.0000001 units), but with enough of a kick, we could have this surplus creating more antimatter, right?
(/end rambling)
This
So how do you keep a neutral particle in an electromagnetic field? Ionize it, and it's just an antiproton, again. It would seem to me that the lightest *anti-atom* you could keep in an electromagnetic field would be singly-ionized antihelium. (After all, doubly-ionized antihelium is just an anti-alpha particle, or is that alpha anti-particle?)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Fission releases energy as electromagnetic repulsion overcomes the strong force. Requires atoms with lots of protons (more than iron has.)
Anti matter and matter obliterating each other releases energy from *everything*. The particles are totally destroyed, converted into energy. All the energy stored in any sort of bond, as well as any mass not created as part of a bond is released.
Fission and fusion convert less than 1% of the material into energy. Antimatter/matter anhillations convert 100% of the energy.
So, uhh, why does this matter?
<ducks while running out door>
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This is somewhat of a mis-interpretation.
I believe a correct interpretation would be to say that in detonating an anti-matter explosion, it's theoretically possible to get out exactly twice as much as you put into it.
It's like by making one anti-particle, you've instantly turned it and one normal particle into an atomic bomb.
E = (m + anti-m) * c^2
That's part of the joy of anti-matter engines. They're maximally efficient in using their fuel. You only have to bring half of your fuel with you! You can scoop up free hydrogen as you go along.
Education is the silver bullet.
A gram of hydrogen contains about 6x10^23 atoms. Therefore, a "few thousand" weighs about 10^-20 grams -- much less than even the smallest virus.
.43^-10 grams)
Western Digital 120 GB HD = 1.32 lb (+/- 0.14 lb)
120 GB = 598.742 g
122, 880 MB = 598.742 g
125829120 KB = 598.742 g
128,849,018,880 Bytes = 598.742 g (+/- 63.5029g)
12 byte virus = 4.6^-10 grams (+/-
Yep, the smallest virus would still be about twice as heavy as the cluster of antimatter atoms
"Get them before they get....
unlikely.
You could've hired me.
http://www.fnal.gov/ This is the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. They have extensive information on particles, particle physics, and how they collider works in general. A very good read if you really want to find out about gluons, quarks, leptons, and all of their asociated anti-particles. G-der gder@gder.net
Does antimatter exhibit anti-gravitational forces? One thing I've always been facisnated with, is the idea of anti-gravity. The way I see it, if there are north and south polarities with magnets, why can't we find the equivalent repellent gravitational force?
(Note: I'm not implying the parent doesn't understand this already. I just wanted to head off a misconception before it started.)
I much overestimated the destructive capability of several thousand anti-hydrogen.
That aside, I'm still curious how they plan to get rid of the stuff, especially as they refined the production capabilities and are able to create more of the stuff?
GPL Deconstructed
its going to be a couple years before i can go to walmart and buy a tank of antimatter. Damn.
-
More likely that the evil Spock from the alternate universe will mind meld with us and turn us into Windows freaks.
"In every revolution, there is one man with a marketing plan." - Bill Gates, to the evil Spock
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
No, that isn't correct. Starting from just matter (as this experiment does), for every anti-matter particle that we make, we also create one matter particle (roughly speaking ... really, we are talking about conserved particle number, but let's ignore the details, shall we?). You produce antimatter by taking a high energy beam of matter, running it through a target (generally a thin sheet of metal of some sort). Collisions between matter particles in the beam and sheet liberate the kinetic energy in the beam particle, and that energy sometimes emerges in the form of particle antiparticle pairs. Thus, if we take a proton beam and train it on a target, we sometimes make antiprotons through the reaction p+p ==> p+p+p+anti-p (we could also make electron-positron pairs, or neutron anti-neutron pairs, etc). We get just as much "new" matter as "new" antimatter. Since we have to make the antimatter in the first place, we can't get out any more than we put in in the first place.
Antimatter propulsion would make even nuclear rockets seem like not much more than a rubber-band airplane. But until we can mass-produce the stuff fission still seems to be the most cost-effective thing we have.
...they got some great negatives.
Liberty uber alles.
Would it be enough to destroy the house? Probably
Yes, and it seems to me that it would blast the atom apart, but - atoms are quite capable of emitting quite large bursts of energy and stay together, and houses are held together by nails, not the weak nuclear force. I've got no idea... I can visualize most of the forces involved, but I have no idea what the equation would look like (heck, thinking about it, I don't even know of the top of my head what form the energy produced is). Thus my plea for a physics geek to think about it for a second or two.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Nice thing about space;
Once you get started you keep on going.
(minus the occasional correction for gravity interferance and such. )
Remember, minimal friction.
The majority of the fuel used up in a space mission is used for taking off, landing, taking off again, and finaly landing back on earth.
What is really needed is a nice space station and some sort of highly efficent method to get people up to that space station. The shuttles could either just be launched once, or built up there to begin with.
Antimatter's efficency at burning IS higher then current fuel technologies though.
(NO fuel CREATES more energy then it took to make it. You can't reverse entropy folks, EVER. Everything is just a battery if you want to look at the long term picture.)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
How the hell are we going to draw square number -1 in the Periodic Table of Elements?
Is it just me, or does it sound like a lot of fun to catch these anti-hydrogen on fire and create antifire. Or smash them together and create antifusion. Sure, we could just annihilate them to make energy, but wouldn't it be such a greater testament to technology (not to mention our sense of irony) if we went through all the trouble of making antimatter just to turn it into a inefficient antiinternal-combustion engine?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Maybe he was just factoring in the relativistic effects of travelling at such a high velocity....
If they are losing one third of the travel trip due to time dilation to get to just the next planet they must be taking one hell of a scenic route, ie a a few laps of the Kuiper belt or the like at the very least.
Everyone assumes that matter + antimatter produces lots of energy.
Unfortunately, every time someone tries to prove it, there are no survivors.
Likely to be quite hot if their containment field collapses...
But the Spock in the alterative universe wasn't really evil (unlike the evil Kirk et. al.). That was the whole point of that episode, in both universes he was neither good nor evil, but logical.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Mass-energy equivalence is demonstrated all the time in particle accelerators, where particle-antiparticle pairs are formed by high-energy collisions. The threshold energies required are mc^2 (in the centre-of-mass frame, more beam energy than mc^2 is required for a stationary target because it recoils and carries some of the energy off). So, yes. matter + antimatter does indeed = lots of energy...
As for the stuff about warp theory... well, people have tried applying general relativity to find ways of travelling FTL, though without accepted success yet... have a search for Alcubierre (though it could be utter crap, I don't know enough about GR to comment!)
Hmmm.
You don't by chance work for Intel, do you? Or perhaps used to, around the time when the first Pentium processors came out?
2+2=5 for suitably large values of 2 and all?
I stand disappointed. =( You've certainly used enough jargon to convince me that you're right - plus what you've said just makes sense.
My only real point was that from the standpoint of raw ingredients going in to a reaction, nothing that we know of is more powerful than anti-matter. If you have to pick one fuel to bring along with you on your spaceship - it's going to be anti-matter. (The other half of the reaction is just matter, and that's everywhere!)
Education is the silver bullet.
On second thought, anyone know if matter + antimatter actually does = lots of energy? I thought that they were going to do some kind of experiment with that but I never heard any more.
.005 grammes of antimatter (quite a lot), and mixed it with the equivilant matter, we would be converting .01 grammes (.00001kg) of matter into energy,
Well, if we took
so If we take E=MC^2
Where M=mass(in kg), C=speed of light (3*10^8 m/s)
= 1*10^-5* 3*10^8 * 3*10^8
= 1*10^-5 * 9*10^16
= 9 * 10^11 Joules of energy
Which is enough to light 10,000 100 watt light bulbs for about 10 days
Thanks for the reply -- I think that /. already archived my journal entry (it treats them like articles), so "no new comments can be added". Blearg. I've added another new journal entry for the purpose of comments, if you'd like to duplicate your post here in my journal. (If you do respond to that one, I'll duplicate this post there.)
:) Generally speaking I use the words "copying" and "copy" rather than "piracy" and "pirate", since it doesn't place a value judgment on the actions, and helps prevent stigmatizing by those I'm communicating with.
:))... what do you think should be done about the whole situation? It's technically infeasible (and socially unpopular) to try and prevent people copying and sharing media content, but take it too far and you end up with the less-content-produced-because-you-can't-make-money situation (at least, in theory). What's the ideal social setup?
I guess I'm not sure what your point is... I was merely pointing out the common definitions of the words "piracy" and "theft", I wasn't trying to justify their usage. Yes, traditionally "piracy" refers to pillage and plunder on the high seas; but "piracy" in terms of "software piracy" is defined correctly in the journal. I should have made it more clear that I was referring to software piracy, rather than generic piracy.
I certainly DON'T think that people should be using the word "piracy" for anything that analogizes poorly to piracy (such as unauthorized copying of copyrighted material), or isn't ACTUAL, sea-borne piracy; but people will keep using it, and we have to deal with it
You seem like you know what you're talking about, so I'll ask you here (although, again, respond in my journal please
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Star Trek is just a TV show, and my message was just a joke
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.