Anti-Matter Created By Laser At Livermore

zootropole alerts us to a press release issued today by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, announcing the production of 'billions of particles of anti-matter.' "Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear. The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma 'jet.' This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts." The press release doesn't characterize the laser used in this experiment, but it may have been this one.

Comments

Re:Holy Mackerel!

[techno-vampire]

Nuclear devices in the megatons have only been deployed and detonated in a theater of openly declared war twice.

If you're referring to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you're wrong. Both of those devices were in the kilotons, not megatons.

Re:Quick question for anyone with the knowledge

[hvm2hvm]

They created billions of positrons with a high power laser. The antimass(?) of a positron is the mass of an electron or 9.1E-31. Let's round it up and say we have 1E+12 positrons. Combine them with 1E+12 electrons, you get
9.1E-31*2E+12*(3E+8)^2=0.018 J.

Now I'm guessing the laser used is pretty powerful and that it consumes a lot of energy. If we take the specs of the laser linked in the summary, then it used 150J on one pulse which is not the true amount of energy they put into the device (it says it takes 30minutes between pulses at full power). The energy used is thousands or millions of times greater than the energy gained.

Of course, lasers might not be the most energy efficient way of creating antimatter but that doesn't change the fact that if you want to turn m matter into antimatter you will need at least 2*mc^2 energy (at least that's my intuitive guess).

Nuclear devices emit huge amount of energy with relatively small energy inputs because the reaction is selfsustaining, something inside the reaction keeps it alive. What you want is something that destabilizes matter and makes it turn into energy by, say, throwing a special particle at neutrons and/or protons. Turning it into antimatter only to collide it with matter afterwards is just a huge waste of energy.