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Physicists Build Bigger 'Bottles' For Antimatter
intellitech writes "Once regarded as the stuff of science fiction, antimatter — the mirror image of the ordinary matter in our observable universe — is now the focus of laboratory studies around the world. While physicists routinely produce antimatter with radioisotopes and particle colliders, cooling these antiparticles and containing them for any length of time is another story. Clifford Surko, a professor of physics at UC San Diego, who is constructing what he hopes will be the world's largest antimatter container, said physicists have recently developed new methods to make special states of antimatter in which they can create large clouds of antiparticles, compress them and make specially tailored beams for a variety of uses."
Can they be pure antiproton? Absolutely pure?
Antimatter has been known and studied since the 1930s or so. I suspect that any science fiction that included antimatter as a subject was written during or after that time. I hate stupid /. headlines.
"...make specially tailored beams for a variety of uses."
Read: blowing stuff up.
I love science!
Hey, competition is important. You don't think that the LHC guys are going to get off their asses and deliver that planet-devouring black hole that they've been holding out on us about if they don't know that the UCSD antimatter team has a competing PhDed existential threat in the works, do you?
Idiots are going to blow us all to Kingdom Come. You know this is just the first step in making a planet buster bomb.
To produce enough anti-matter to match the destructive potential of the Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb, you would need the energy output of a gigawatt power station for 6.6 years. And that is assuming perfect production and storage which we are no where close to achieving. In reality, it takes orders of magnitude more energy to crate anti-matter than can get out of the annihilation of that anti-matter, so the actual length of time would be closer to 600 years than 6.
So, sorry, no earth shattering kaboom just yet.
Woot, go UCSD!
Ushering in the apocalypse since 1960!
We did a lot of nuke and miltech stuff, especially during the Vietnam War era. I didn't get to do much cool stuff when I was there, just an interference resistant videoconferencing system for soldiers in the field, and some work with severed rabbit hearts kept alive and beating in a vitrious solution...
The Red Shoe was apparently the 4th sign of the Apocalypse, and the Stuart Art collection is rumoured to have another piece as well, though gazing upon it is rumoured to induce permanent insanity.
...they can create large clouds of antiparticles, compress them and make specially tailored beams for a variety of uses."
And mad scientists all over the world rejoice at the thought of building their first orbital, antimatter death ray.
On a less sinister note, if they can guide an anti- beam in a controlled manner to impact a regular beam they could take the first steps towards some sort of epic anti-matter based propulsion system.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
You'd only need a bit over 1kg of matter and a bit over a kg of antimatter to equal the output of Tsar Bomba.
I assume this means that they've also perfected the use of di-lithium? and, I can't believe that I'm the first one in this bunch to mention dilithium..
I have a bag of sugar - we're half way there!
Yes but I think the antimatter annihilation reaction would cause side reactions that would release neutrons and create more nuclear waste...
In practice, though, the reason highly radioactive nuclear waste even exists as a problem is because it ISN'T waste - it's unburned fuel. More than 99% of the energy in the nuclear fuel is still remaining, which is why the waste can emit dangerous levels of radiation for thousands of years.
How much antimatter do you need to make a bomb that will, say, take down an medium-to-high-rise apartment complex?
Once the technology to create and contain antimatter indefinitely is available AND is small enough to fit on a tabletop, how long before some terrorists buys a condo and sets up a "slow bomb" that will detonate in 10 or 20 years, after it's created and stored enough antimatter to take out the building when it goes boom?
OK, maybe he's okay if it doesn't take out the building, he just wants to scare people, so he buys 10 condos around town and 10 years later there's 10 explosions and 10 severely damaged buildings staggered seemingly randomly over the course of a month, and everyone is wondering "OMG, does my neighbor have a bomb in the basement?"
Of course, by then we won't be saying OMG, but I digress.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Get a vat of antimatter, and throw it at a landfill. Storage problem solved. Who cares about "logistics." It's science motherfucka's.
Anti-proton wanders through normal matter and hits a proton. Boom, 2 anti-protons gone, lots of energy created. The atom the proton was in not only lost a proton but its nucleus may be shattered as well. Depending on the atom, this may result in a net release or absorption of energy.
In any case, I wouldn't want to be a nearby atom.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Will it a positron beam cut through my pile of neutron-star matter?
More seriously, will it cut through muonic atoms that have no electrons?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Idiots are going to blow us all to Kingdom Come. You know this is just the first step in making a planet buster bomb.
To produce enough anti-matter to match the destructive potential of the Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb, you would need the energy output of a gigawatt power station for 6.6 years. And that is assuming perfect production and storage which we are no where close to achieving. In reality, it takes orders of magnitude more energy to crate anti-matter than can get out of the annihilation of that anti-matter, so the actual length of time would be closer to 600 years than 6.
So, sorry, no earth shattering kaboom just yet.
You've answered the total energy problem, but not the power problem. For example a stick of dynamite and a piece of cake have about the same total energy content, its just dynamite releases it at a literally supersonic rate, whereas it takes hour (years?) to use the chemical energy from a piece of cake in my tummy.
Its entirely possible a Tsar Bomba sized antimatter bomb would slowly "burn" like the worlds scariest refinery fire. Might take "a long time" to fully react as a tiny bit blows a very clean vacuum around itself by the gammas heating the air, repeat as an oscillator. Oh it would be very destructive, but probably take many orders of magnitude longer than a nuke to react.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Ushering in the apocalypse since 1960!
The first 50+ years were just for practice!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
if they can guide an anti- beam in a controlled manner to impact a regular beam
Don't cross the beams. Trust me. It will be bad.*
*Blatant copyright violation.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Speaking for the antimatter, I believe that there is a misconception. We don't appreciate being called the "anti" matter. We are the other-matter to you. From our perspective, you are the antimatter! You don't like it very much when someone calls YOU antimatter do you. I wish we could all just get along but it was not meant to be. We will continue to annihilate any of you that try to contact us. Please! Just leave us alone!!!!
Thank You
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
So perhaps an antimatter bomb would work sort of like the nuclear weapons envisioned by H. G. Wells in The World Set Free. He imagined nuclear weapons as no more powerful that ordinary explosives, but they continued to explode for days.
So the total amount of energy released would be similar to a nuclear weapon as we know them, but not instantaneous. It would be a very effective device for some creative tactical uses, imagine a fire that burns with the power of a conventional bomb for days on end that you can't put out.
Eat the rich.
Can they mount the anti-matter beam emitters on sharks? That would be awesome.
I imagine it would depend on the state of the antimatter and the surface area in contact with ordinary matter. But fast - enough heat and you'd get antimatter vapor, which would rapidly expand from the heat produced and intermix with a large volume of air.
Sure. But the energy cost of manufacturing antimatter would be more than the energy produced.
Honestly this is the first post to make me genuinely laugh in a long time.
I witness this first hand; the first one was built in the 1980s in NYC. Quite simple really. Load a trap here, open, unlock the system. Insert the trap, release, close, lock the system. Set your entry grid, neutralize your field and... the light is green, the trap is clean..
Is salt anti-sugar? Cause I have a kilo of that.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Well up above the tropostrata
There is a region stark and stellar
Where, on a streak of anti-matter
Lived Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.
Remote from Fusion's origin,
He lived unguessed and unawares
With all his antikith and kin,
And kept macassars on his chairs.
One morning, idling by the sea,
He spied a tin of monstrous girth
That bore three letters: A. E. C.
Out stepped a visitor from Earth.
Then, shouting gladly o'er the sands,
Met two who in their alien ways
Were like as lentils. Their right hands
Clasped, and the rest was gamma rays.
-- Harold P Furth
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Why don't they, y'know, USE it?
Now all you need is a bottle of lemon juice (anti sweet).
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
As far as I know H-bombs are made using a traditional atom bomb as trigger. Use the H-bomb as trigger to the antimatter bomb, I figure a multi-megaton blast will mix matter and anti-matter and set off a ton of reactions at the same time. I'm guessing gigaton range...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What could possibly go wrong?
First you get the sugar...
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I'm sure there's a temperature below which a mixture of matter and antimatter would be stable, but I haven't a clue as to what it is (other than that it is likely to be low).
Might be some really interesting chemistry here...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Well, regardless of moderation. I thought this was funny.
This has been discussed many times here. It goes something like this: Carter [or whoever] made an executive order that says we can't use the stuff, because, in doing so, we would be able to make more nuclear weapons material or something. So, the stuff is really useful, but we aren't legally allowed to use it. So it is only waste in a legal sense. tl;dr if this was China [or some other developing country or France probably] we would be using it. Also, all of the above was reconstructed from my memory of barely read posts about this, so don't take it as gospel, but it should be enough to help you find the real answer on google or something.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Russians down bottles of vodka, lone jocks in the wilderness down bottles of Solo, but physicists down bottles of antimatter. Now who's da man, eh?
Theoretically you could make a hydrogen bomb powerful enough to be a "crust buster" at the least. You just need a *lot* of lithium and Deuterium, and a pretty big fission trigger or triggers, or even a hydrogen bomb trigger.
But the biggest deployed H bomb by the US was 25Mt yield and weighed less than 10tonns IIRC. So by a lot, I don't really mean a lot compared to the size of the planet. In fact 25 tonns of LiD can produce a bomb of over 1 GTon (1000Mt) and would be a cube 3 meters on each side. You still need a trigger, hohlraum and tamper. This is too small to be a true doomsday device. But you get the idea. If you hide it in a warehouse, say 30x10x10, you are a 100x more powerful and need 2700tons of LiD--so we getting up to a 1000Gt yield.....
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Proton Anti-proton annihilation does not result in gamma rays. Protons are made out of quarks, so you get more interesting results. The primary products are on average an even split of all 3 Pions, +, - and 0. The 0 decays almost immediately to gammas, and there goes 1/3 of your energy. However these are high energy gammas and will deposit there energy in a fairly short range in dense (ie higher than air) medium, and still quite confined in air (ie miles). The + and - Pions have quite a long life time (2.6e-8 s mean life time) and are traveling almost at the speed of light. They can travel many meters in free space. However since they are charged they dump there energy into matter very quickly. Heating the sounding mass to insane temperatures. Finally the changed Pions decay into muons and neutrinos.
Now you have a ball of matter heated to millions even billions of degrees. This emits massive amounts of x rays which then heats a even bigger ball of matter. It should be noted in conventional nukes, the initial hot ball of plasma heats a larger ball of matter via x rays. This "secondary" ball of heated material expands creating the destructive shockwave.
It would be very easy to ensure rapid mixing of matter and antimatter. There are many instabilities that aid the mixing.
Note that as with conventional nukes, they do rely on dumping energy into surrounding matter. In a vacuum like in space, the effects are very different and pretty much attenuated compared to "surface work".
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
"I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade, let alone create one."
First they burn books, then they burn people.
"and the science gets done and we make a neat gun for the people who are still alive." Woot! Let there be cake.
H-bombs are set off that way because the energy cost to set off a nuclear fission/fusion chain reaction is quite high. There is no such problem with anti-matter. In fact, a far more likely scenario is the use of anti-matter to set off a H-bombs (replacing traditional methods) allowing for much, much smaller H-bombs.
... out of anti-matter even if you had a big supply of it. Some simulations have indicated that as the antimatter began to contact matter, the energy of the initial annihilation reactions would drive the antimatter away from the site where the reaction began. So... you have a bottle of anti-matter, you "open" the "bottle", annhilations begin... and the antimatter is driven back into the bottle. Alternatively, you make the bottle disappear all at once, and the annihilation "flame front" proceeds somewhat slowly (in relative terms) into the mass of anti-matter. In either case, you wind up with something more like a big "whoosh" than a bang. I used to have a link where this was discussed... unfortunately can't find it now.