CERN Ups Antimatter Confinement Record to 15+ Minutes

A team at CERN has vastly increased its ability to confine antimatter, says an article published today at Scientific American. Last year, the same researchers managed to trap atoms of antihydrogen. "But," says the SciAm report, "the antihydrogen had at that time been confined for less than two tenths of a second. That interval has now been extended by a factor of more than 5,000. In a study published online June 5 in Nature Physics, the ALPHA group reports having confined antihydrogen for 16 minutes and 40 seconds. The more relevant number for physicists, who often deal in powers of 10, is 1,000 seconds."

Comments

Obligatory : Can It

[Anonymous Coward]

be put in a suitcase?

Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout

Re:Obligatory : Can It

[Lanteran]

Not really- as in I doubt it would be economical to have gigantic particle accelerators running for years on end all over the planet to generate even the small amount of antimatter it takes to reach orbit as opposed to refine a couple million gallons of conventional fuel. Not to mention that fueling a ship on antimatter is far more akin to fueling a ship on nuclear bombs than rocket fuel- total redesign. And I imagine given the nature of antimatter, storage difficulties increase exponentially with size. However, if we could generate a significant amount, it'd be useful in near-light orion style intra and interstellar propulsion.

Re:Obligatory : Can It

[angel'o'sphere]

Not really. If you have a nice antimatter storage you will beam it atom wise or in small chunks out of it into your engine. Thus you have a constant acceleration and not an orion style one.

Re:Obligatory : Can It

[jgtg32a]

In Soviet Russia it can be.

...That's actually really scary.

Re:Obligatory : Can It

[Lanteran]

Unless you have it in a stream which somehow doesn't all go off once the matter reaction starts, it will be pulsed. Of course, it wouldn't matter much as in "jerky" acceleration if it was done in small chunks, nearly constantly.

If that's not playing God,

[Hermanas]

Then I don't know what is. These guys are no longer playing with the stuff our universe is made of, they're now playing with what it's /not/ made of. That's quite amazing, if you ask me.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[FooAtWFU]

Wait until they start building bigger bombs with it. ;)

Re:If that's not playing God,

[EdZ]

Nope, the universe just isn't made mostly of antimatter. Antimatter is created by natural (if staggeringly high energy processes) without human intervention.

Now if they'd created and confined matter with a negative energy, THEN I'd be very surprised.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Hermanas]

Yes yes, be persnickety about it. This is slashdot, after all.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[iggymanz]

since they've to date confined less than 400 anti-atoms, there is no danger of any kind of weapon being built with this kind of technology in the next few decades. Antimatter is horribly energy-intensive to make, well known stat you can check at wikipedia is at the current production rate at CERN it would take 100 billion years to make a gram of the stuff. We're not going to get the hundreds of tons for a fast starship drive this way.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[jdpars]

The whole point of this story is that they're getting better at dealing with antimatter. Eventually, the antimatter bomb will be the next nuclear bomb.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[im_thatoneguy]

On the other hand, in a few short years we've gone from picoseconds to 16 seconds.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[crgrace]

Oh, please.

Equal parts of matter and anti-matter were created in the Big Bang, and anti-matter is created regularly as part of Beta decay. It isn't "not of this universe".

It is quite amazing, though. I agree with you there.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[crgrace]

Beta+ decay isn't a particularly high energy process. It happens in the brain of anyone who has ever had a PET scan, and they live to tell the tale.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[iggymanz]

nope, they're getting better at *storing* it, but there's no changing the fearsome energies to make it. We could make antimatter until the Sun burns out, and the total wouldn't be enough to blow your nose, let alone blow up a building.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Arancaytar]

Fissile material with vast stores of potential energy occurs naturally. Every subatomic particle of weaponized antimatter would have to be synthesized using orders of magnitude more power than the weapon would have. Before you create enough antimatter to light a bulb, you could wipe out most of humanity with ordinary nuclear weapons. Regardless how easy it will become to produce or store antimatter, it will always take more energy than it is worth.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[pushing-robot]

16 minutes (closer to 17), not sixteen seconds.

Speaking of 17 minutes, I'm waiting for someone to write a short story about someone needing to crack a NTLM password before an antimatter bottle loses containment.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[symbolset]

At the current rate of progress it should be a useful method of storing energy for weapons or space travel in about 15 years. It's not linear. They're doing good work here. I don't know why you think a starship would require hundreds of tons of antimatter. That's an awful lot.

We don't need any new weapons. We've enough applied physics to immolate the world already and enough applied chemistry and biology to wipe out the survivors. Of course weapons will be made, but we're past the point where they make the global tension situation any more dire. It's not like smuggling an antimatter bomb into some close quarter and detonating it is going to be a deniable thing. We all pretty much know who has the antimatter.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[ThunderBird89]

If the two were created in equal amounts, why is the universe we see mostly positive matter? There was possibly some effect or interaction in the first few picoseconds to skew the balance in favor of the stuff we're made up of, otherwise the universe would have been reduced to a hot photon soup pretty fast by runaway annihilation.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[GooberToo]

You're right. With the money required to create an anti-matter bomb, you could afford to carpet bomb the world with nukes. And at this time, that doesn't seem likely to change anytime in the next hundred years - at least!

Re:If that's not playing God,

[francium de neobie]

That's because you've set your bar of a "God" way too low - it's not like they've changed the vacuum speed of light, or the gravitation constant, or made 1+1=3 for everywhere in the universe, yet.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Bizzeh]

you cant play as something that doesnt exist, also, there is plenty of anti-matter in the universe, and there used to be a lot more according to current theories. what is wrong with attempting to contain some of what falls out of their experiment?

Re:If that's not playing God,

[khallow]

there is no danger of any kind of weapon being built with this kind of technology in the next few decades.

And you base this on what? Not so long ago, they couldn't store antimatter at all. Going from nothing to something is a bigger hurdle than going from storing small amounts for short times to storing militarily useful amounts for a long time.

Antimatter is horribly energy-intensive to make, well known stat you can check at wikipedia is at the current production rate at CERN it would take 100 billion years to make a gram of the stuff.

If someone figures out how to convert electricity to stored antimatter (halflife of storage, say being on the order of decades to centuries) at a 1% efficiency, then the current electricity output of the US (roughly a terawatt averaged over a year) could produce a kilogram of antimatter every 7-8 months or so. That's equivalent to a bit over 40 megatons of bomb (including the kilogram of regular matter which also gets converted to energy).

Still that's roughly 3 billion usd per megaton of explosive power (just in energy cost at $0.05 per kWh). I see antimatter bombs not filling the roles of the 250kton-1 megaton bombs (or larger), but things on the order of compact 0.1-1 kiloton bombs (useful for shattering deep underground structures). Much cheaper and fills a niche that currently isn't covered by nuclear or conventional weapons.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[cduffy]

The most thorough treatment of the subject I've seen is that of Robert Forward (who did a study on the subject commissioned by the military). His findings were to the effect that if antimatter production were treated as an engineering problem rather than a scientific one, production of useful quantities would be entirely feasible using incremental and reasonably-foreseen advances on existing technology.

Whether or not you buy his argument in full, there's no doubt that we throw away most of the energy involved in creating antimatter, and much of that needlessly (as we only know how to capture a very small portion of the results). As such, the claim that "there's no changing" the power requirements is false on its face.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[fnj]

You're pretty sure about that, are you? One microgram of antimatter reacting with one microgram of matter would liberate as much energy as detonating 43 kg of TNT. About 4 nanograms would liberate as much energy as a hand grenade. I don't know how much antimatter we could "make" until the Sun burns out (that's a pretty long time), but it wouldn't take very much anti-matter to be enough to blow your nose. Something well below the picogram range I would say.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not true. Antimatter is the most potent known energy storage medium in the universe and as such can be used from anything to near-luminal space travel to power for micro-machines. Also, you're statement about it taking more energy to produce that it releases during annihilation applies to any energy storage medium because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics although I do admit it does take much more excess work energy to store energy in the form of antimatter. ( remember that you also have to enrich uranium, manufacture the detonation mechanism and high explosives )

As for your statement "Before you create enough antimatter to light a bulb, you could wipe out most of humanity with ordinary nuclear weapons" this is just categorically false. The problem now is that current particle accelerators are designed to study particle physics, not to produce antimatter. In fact, Robert Forward showed that if we were to build accelerators specifically designed to produce antimatter ( perhaps special linear wake-field accelerators ), we could potentially produce at least 1 milligram of antimatter per year at a cost of only around a 10 million dollars. If one where to use many accelerators in parallel that where able to produce higher energies, that amount might be up in the gram/kilogram range. In the future, we might harness the power of a rapidly rotating micro-back-hole as it's been proved, theoretically, that matter in such a black hole's accretion disk gets converted directly into energy with 50% efficiency.

To put things in perspective, it only takes a milligram or so of antimatter to put the shuttle into orbit.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Paua Fritter]

On the other hand, in a few short years we've gone from picoseconds to 16 seconds.

Ha! You Americans with your old-fashioned units of "years" and "hours" and so on ... get with the programme people!
If you had 28 grammes of sense you would just take 6 dekaseconds to learn the Systeme Internationale - it's not that hard.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[nitehawk214]

But 1 gram of hydrogen is 6 * 10^23 atoms. So yes, unless there is some big leap in production capacity it will be centuries before we can even produce a useful amount for a weapon.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[sjames]

We've so far managed 400 atoms worth worldwide. If we do that a mere 6*10^20 more times we'll have enough for something a bit more powerful than Fat Man (but only a bit).

So, let's be really generous and assume 400 atoms a year. When the sun swells and engulfs the earth in about 5*10^9 years, we'll have produced about 3 picograms worth.

That's enough to blow your nose OFF, so you're technically correct. However, if we want an antimater bomb, we'll have to step it up.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

That is currently one of the biggest unanswered questions in the world of science. Theoretically, equal parts of matter and antimatter where created during the big bang. Why they didn't annihilate each other hasn't been explained yet.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[ppanon]

I wonder if you could use antimatter as a hydrogen bomb trigger. Would the shock front from the antimatter annihilation be enough to compress D2 in surrounding heavy water to fusion? If it could then it would amp-up the released energy while keeping a compact package. For instance, what if you had four or six traps and emptied them out in a controlled fashion at a central repository of heavy water so that you used anti-matter annihilation to reproduce on a large scale what the laser ignition facility does on a small scale? That could give you a substantial power increase, without the radioactivity telltales of U/Pu triggers.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[fahrbot-bot]

Now if they'd created and confined matter with a negative energy, THEN I'd be very surprised.

Simple. Store it in a room arranged by a very bad Fung Shui decorator.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Lanteran]

We all pretty much know who has the antimatter.

The Illuminati right?

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Lije Baley]

As I often say, no unit can be taken seriously unless it can be kept in a jar in France! However, I'm still trying to figure out where they keep that 300,000 kilometer long jar with the second in it.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[KublaKhan1797]

Touché :) I'm all out of mod points, but you still get a 'pseudo' +1 from me

Re:If that's not playing God,

[ppanon]

Um, no. If I remember correctly, the fission part of an H-Bomb releases both Gamma and neutrons. The neutrons are what give you the fission chain reaction, but neutrons, gammas, and other fission products all add to the heat content when they transfer their KE in collisions with the surroundings. The thing about annihilation X-Rays is that they would be more likely to pass through the D2 without interaction (for the same reason they are used to take medical pictures). So he does make a good point. Maybe it might be possible to use a heavy element (like lead) to keep the energy from escaping and redirect it internally through ablation. It does seem less likely though, and would only be somewhat less nasty in fallout than using U or Pu.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Dantoo]

The anti-matter went the other way - into anti-space/time. Over there they can't figure out where we went.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[jegerjensen]

In fact there is an accelerator built specifically to produce antimatter: the Antiproton Decelerator which supplied the anti-protons to the ALPHA experiment. Also, its a bit funny that you seem to forget that the ALPHA project built their equipment specifically to produce and store anti-atoms.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Gaygirlie]

Then I don't know what is. These guys are no longer playing with the stuff our universe is made of, they're now playing with what it's /not/ made of. That's quite amazing, if you ask me.

Uhh. The universe IS made of both matter and anti-matter, so...

Re:If that's not playing God,

[angel'o'sphere]

Regardless how easy it will become to produce or store antimatter, it will always take more energy than it is worth.

How much it is worth will determine the market.
I know enough people who would pay everything they have to get a few grams. Imagine a trip to mars under full 1 g acceleration ...

Re:If that's not playing God,

[angel'o'sphere]

Also, you're statement about it taking more energy to produce that it releases during annihilation applies to any energy storage medium because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics although I do admit it does take much more excess work energy to store energy in the form of antimatter.

Would you care to elaborate what the 2nd law of thermodynamics has to do with energy storage? Especially in case of anti matter?

However you are right regarding the cost of antimatter production.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[KritonK]

We're not going to get the hundreds of tons for a fast starship drive this way.

Maybe not, but perhaps we now have enough antimatter to calculate the correct matter/antimatter intermix ratio!

Re:If that's not playing God,

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Look up antimatter catalyzed micro fusion. In other words, Yes.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Not correct. Protons and anti protons are not fundamental particles, but are made up of quarks. 2/3 of the energy is thus released as charged Pions moving at close to the speed of light. They would dump most of their energy into the surrounding matter before decaying. The other 1/3 of the energy will go into gammas (from a 0 pion decay intermediary) which does interact with the surrounding matter, but over longer ranges.

Long story short. You get something very similar to a normal nuke, without the neutrons and fallout.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[jdpars]

We need units with better names than "dekaseconds" though. Perhaps we could use seconds, lilbits, justaminutes, awhiles, and latres?

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Muad'Dave]

You don't need anti-atoms for weapons. Regular old anti-particles will do; they're much easier to confine, and they're made naturally all the time. See my recent post that points out some of the natural ways antiparticles are produced.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[ImprovOmega]

Why bother? If you could generate enough anti-matter to make a decent trigger out of (and contain it) why not just make an antimatter bomb? Matter-anti-matter reactions are something like 50x as powerful as nuclear reactions of the same mass (I forget the exact numbers and am not willing to look it up right now). And all you would need would be a containment vessel and a means to stop containing the anti-matter. Big boom, done.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[radtea]

since they've to date confined less than 400 anti-atoms, there is no danger of any kind of weapon being built with this kind of technology in the next few decades

I believe the term you're looking for is "moonshine". That is the traditional way of dismissing a scientific discovery still in it's infancy yet only twenty years away from changing the world.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Rogerborg]

Weaponised bananas? You know it's only a matter of time until the damn dirty apes get their stinking paws on them, right?

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Rogerborg]

If the two were created in equal amounts, why is the universe we see mostly positive matter?

The universe should be soup anyway. Something went went wrong with the recipe, and it got lumpy. Given the essential improbability of our existence, I don't have a problem with all the extant matter being hither and all the extant antimatter yonder, on the galactic or galactic-cluster scale.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Muad'Dave]

I have mod points but can't give one to you! Dang it!

Re:If that's not playing God,

[ThunderBird89]

Boltzmann brains? If that were true, I wonder why my imagination created all the bastards this world has... :)

Re:If that's not playing God,

[jayme0227]

Wouldn't that be an anti-matter dark sucker?

Re:If that's not playing God,

[rainmouse]

Can I ask where you get your figures from? I was under the (possibly very mistaken) impression that the explosion created when matter combined with anti-matter was likely a myth and that really they just cancel each other out.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Jonner]

The universe is made of both matter and antimatter. It's just that there turned out to be more matter for some reason that still hasn't been discovered. Since we're made of matter, we don't see any antimatter nearby as it would annihilate us.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[marcosdumay]

The second is in a small jar with cesium in it, and has no relation to the speed of light. I guess you were talking about the meter, but then your joke is no fun anymore...

Re:If that's not playing God,

[GameboyRMH]

Just fiddle with the mixture screw on yer antimatter carburetor 'till she runs smooth, it ain't rocket science!

Re:If that's not playing God,

[John Hasler]

Your impression is most definitely very mistaken.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[John Hasler]

...we could potentially produce at least 1 milligram of antimatter per year at a cost of only around a 10 million dollars.

Does that include capture and confinement?

Re:If that's not playing God,

[Lije Baley]

In my day, the meter was a stick in a jar in France, and the speed of light was how many stick lengths light traveled while your cesium atom wiggled nine billion times. Sometime later (probably still before you were born) the meter was redefined in terms of that which it had already measured. Now GET OFF MY LAWN!

Re:If that's not playing God,

[ppanon]

Why bother? If you could generate enough anti-matter to make a decent trigger out of (and contain it) why not just make an antimatter bomb? Matter-anti-matter reactions are something like 50x as powerful as nuclear reactions of the same mass (I forget the exact numbers and am not willing to look it up right now). And all you would need would be a containment vessel and a means to stop containing the anti-matter. Big boom, done.

Well, the whole point of the parent thread was that anti-matter costs a lot of energy to make. Heavy water takes a lot less energy to separate. So what if a gram of antimatter is more powerful than 50 grams of D2 fusion? If it takes you all year to produce that gram, but you use it to partially fuse a few litres of heavy water and get 10 or more times the yield, then you still have a pretty compact non-radioactive package and it didn't take you 10 years to create the antimatter for it.

Also consider that your basic anti-matter explosion is probably going to be fairly anisotropic. However by carefully using anti-matter to light fusion fuel, you might be able to pull off a shaped fusion reaction by leaving slightly less surrounding antimatter in one direction. That might make it more energy efficient as an in-system drive than pure anti-matter or pure fusion, and for warships it wouldn't be as subject to external interference like a magnetically constrained fusion drive would be.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[juhaz]

Can I ask where you get your figures from? I was under the (possibly very mistaken) impression that the explosion created when matter combined with anti-matter was likely a myth and that really they just cancel each other out.

Conservation of energy would like to have a chat with you.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[khallow]

The Earth and human society evolve with time. What isn't true now may well be easily achievable in the future.

Also, while I can recognize you by the "space nutter" comments, why don't you get yourself an account? It's not that hard.

And when did you become obssessed with weaponry?

I merely replied to a poster who dismissed the military applications of anti-matter.

Re:If that's not playing God,

[asllearner]

your entire post is wrong

Powers of ten

[tttonyyy]

I don't read slashdot anywhere near as much as I used to. And on this brief foray to sample from the pool of away-from-maintream reporting, what am I met with - an exciting progression in scientific endevour twisted into a painfully patronising slashdot summary.

See you in another 10^3 days, hopefully there will be some improvement, but I won't be holding my breath :/

Re:Powers of ten

[Hermanas]

To be fair, that is a direct quote from the article, so even though the summary editor could have exercised some discretion and removed it, at least it's not his own patronizing words.

Re:Powers of ten

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot: News for YOUR MOM, stuff that EVEN FOX NEWS PASSED ON

Re:Powers of ten

[Hermanas]

Hahah, good one

Re:Powers of ten

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Well thank god you logged in long enough to register your disgust. How else would we have know to be appropriately sad for being deprived of your magnificent presence ?

Re:Powers of ten

[tttonyyy]

Well thank god you logged in long enough to register your disgust. How else would we have know to be appropriately sad for being deprived of your magnificent presence ?

You make a fair point. But also; welcome to the internet ;)

Re:Powers of ten

[Tuan121]

You do realize that was a quote from the article?

Re:Powers of ten

[sempir]

I don't read slashdot anywhere near as much as I used to. And on this brief foray to sample from the pool of away-from-maintream reporting, what am I met with - an exciting progression in scientific endevour twisted into a painfully patronising slashdot summary.

See you in another 10^3 days, hopefully there will be some improvement, but I won't be holding my breath :/

Bloody hell. I've only this minute noticed you haven't been in here for some time. Long time no miss!

Unacceptable.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

As a true, red-blooded American I take pride in my nation's tough-on-crime policies of long sentences and harsh incarceration. It is simply unacceptable that some multinational research team of limp-wristed European eggheads is imposing tougher sentences on antiparticles than we are.

I, for one, will not be voting for anybody who can't promise that 25% of the world's antihydrogen will be doing 20-to-life in our very own 'SuperMax' high energy physics institutes.

Re:Unacceptable.

[ColdWetDog]

You fool! You put antimatter in a SuperMax prison with all sorts of hardened criminals and you'll get ANTIHEROs.

And then where will we be, Mr. Smartypants American Patriot? There is a reason that the world hates us.

Re:Unacceptable.

[crankyspice]

You put antimatter in a SuperMax prison with all sorts of hardened criminals and you'll get ANTIHEROs.

Will they shoot first, or will they let Greedo take the first shot while doing a weird head-dance around the blaster bolt?

Re:Unacceptable.

[Alien Being]

Chill. It doesn't matter.

Re:Unacceptable.

[melikamp]

I am so sick of you antiantimatter conservatives! I, for one, believe that matter and antimatter can co-exist peacefully. I refuse to discriminate based on a trivial single-bit difference, and will continue working together with our antimatter brethren on building a brighter futuNO CARRIER

Re:Unacceptable.

[chill]

What doesn't?

Re:Unacceptable.

[BergZ]

You limp wristed academics are turning this country into a bunch of WIMPs!

Re:Unacceptable.

[ILongForDarkness]

Billions and billions of anti-HEROS are going through you at this very moment. But not nearly as many as HEROS, modern science still doesn't fully understand this asymmetry but given a few more strings multi-billion dollar labs we'll figure it out in time for your great grand children's 6th grade term paper.

Re:Unacceptable.

[syousef]

You fool! You put antimatter in a SuperMax prison with all sorts of hardened criminals and you'll get ANTIHEROs.
And then where will we be, Mr. Smartypants American Patriot? There is a reason that the world hates us.

Bad superhero jokes?

Re:Unacceptable.

[bryan1945]

I wonder how many people caught/will catch the joke?

Re:Unacceptable.

[Alien Being]

Precisely, chill.

Re:1000 seconds

[Noughmad]

Yes, here we are again with the journalistic conversions:
~100 m => 328.08 ft

Re:If that's not playing God

[Your.Master]

Translated:

I am Anonymous Coward. I do not understand metaphor.

All instances of the word "God" refer invariably to literal belief in the being described in the King James Version of the Bible (on sale now at a bookstore near you!).

it blows at the of 38min give or take

[Joe_Dragon]

it blows at the of 38min give or take

Re:If that's not playing God

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am Anonymous Coward. I do not understand metaphor." - neither do most followers of religions.

No it isn't...

[denzacar]

IT'S A TRAP!

Its playing physicist, not playing god

[perpenso]

If that's not playing God, then I don't know what is. These guys are no longer playing with the stuff our universe is made of, they're now playing with what it's /not/ made of. That's quite amazing, if you ask me.

My understanding is that the universe is made of both matter and antimatter, just much more of the former and not so much of the later. Matter is just more prevalent and has therefore survived the annihilations.

Re:It's...

[ChromeAeonium]

9000. It's over 9000.

No weapons no healthcare

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't have health care unless you already have a military. Government run services only last as long as the government. Kuwaiti hospitals had pretty good tech and services until the Iraqis came by and started carrying away equipment.

What test should we run first?

[Anonymous Coward]

Initial studies will involve irradiating the anti-atoms with microwaves

Researcher #1: Wow, we've managed to captured antimatter for a 1000 seconds. What now?
Researcher #2: Lets see what happens if we stick it in the microwave! Ever nuke an egg?

Re:1000 seconds

[fnj]

Ahem, that's 328.083989501 ft. Let's get the conversion straight.

Re:1000 seconds

[hakey]

I can imagine in the interview the scientists trying to explain the concept of orders of magnitude. Scientist: "You see it doesn't matter if was exactly 15 or 16 minutes, the point is we can now achieve confinement for an order of magnitude of a thousand seconds." Reporter thinking to himself while writing the story: "so it's 1000 seconds, lets see thats exactly 16 minutes and 40 seconds. Now what was they where trying to explain to me about powers of 10, I better put that in to look smart, oh yeah, the more relevant number for physicists, who often deal in powers of 10, is 1,000 seconds."

What about negative mass?

[mangu]

if they'd created and confined matter with a negative energy, THEN I'd be very surprised.

Imagine negative mass, it's attracted to normal mass but normal mass is repelled by negative mass. A piece of negative mass near a piece of normal mass will be under constant acceleration.

Somewhat like a geek near a pretty girl.

Re:What about negative mass?

[error_logic]

I've actually been fixated on that concept off and on for the better part of two years now... Trying to find something, somewhere, to rule it out, in spite of numerous hints that such a scenario could actually relate to a lot of unsolved problems.

Anyone got a substantiated answer beyond "gravity doesn't work that way" or the like?

Re:What about negative mass?

[jegerjensen]

This idea would violate Newtons third law about mutual forces acting in the opposite direction! The joke was funny, but clearly unphysical.

Re:If that's not playing God

[Ironhandx]

According to numerous studies, while its not impossible to be intelligent and believe in god, it automatically deducts about 20 IQ points to have such a belief. Making your claim of believing in god and being intelligent less believable.

I'm just curious

[guybrush3pwood]

Can you see antimatter? Does it reflect and/or emit any kind of radiation? I'm too lazy to google it, and since slashdot is populated by so many examples of fine PhDs, I post the question.

Re:I'm just curious

[tragedy]

Yes, you can see antimatter. Except for transparent antimatter (actually, that is a pretty interesting thought, anyone know if anyone has done any reliable work on what the likely physical properties of antimatter elements would be) and, of course, the antimatter only present in microscopic amounts. As it turns out, we've only worked with it in microscopic amounts so far. If you were in a situation where you were dealing with a macroscopic amount of antimatter and you were looking right at it, you'd have to be really, really, really confident in the containment technology to not be escaping as fast as you could run/drive/fly. Anyway, there are sure to be ways to detect antimatter non-destructively although they may be difficult, but it certainly emits gamma radiation when it annihilates with regular matter, so you can certainly tell that you had antimatter in your container after the fact.

Re:I'm just curious

[guybrush3pwood]

The question progresses further, of course. Does it interact with the known forces of the universe just like matter? Does it have an electric charge, for instance, or the concept of electric charge does not apply? Is there a "periodic table" for antimatter?

How little I know about such things, it is plain sad. If one had 1000 lifetimes in order to learn, it wouldn't be enough.

Re:I'm just curious

[crgrace]

Actually, antimatter should look and act exactly like matter, except for the whole explosion thing when it interacts with matter.

Re:I'm just curious

[tbird81]

That's a really interesting question. I don't really know anything about this, and have only done high school physics. But from first principles, and a quick google, it seems like photons would interact with antimatter in the same way as matter. So the antimatter would look the same.

Apparently "antiphotons" are the same thing as photons.

Re:I'm just curious

[tbird81]

I found this site for the educated layperson, that gives a quick overview of particles.

It might be of interest to GP that gravity affects antimatter the same as matter.

Re:I'm just curious

[adavies42]

Does it have an electric charge, for instance, or the concept of electric charge does not apply?

Antimatter is more or less defined by having an opposite (electric or other type) charge from regular matter. (Some electrically-neutral particles (like neutrons) have antiparticles through being composed of antiparticles of their composite particles; some are their own antiparticles (photons); some are still up for debate (neutrinos, apparently (TIL)).

Does it interact with the known forces of the universe just like matter?

Antimatter is presumed to have the same mass (in both senses) as matter, and thus to interact with gravity identically, but this is only just now becoming directly testable. (Gravity is basically unmeasurable on the quantities of antimatter we've had available so far--its effect on single particles is completely swamped by all the other, much stronger forces.)

Is there a "periodic table" for antimatter?

Antimatter is a phenomenon at the particle level, not the atom level, so the closest equivalent of the Periodic Table would be the Standard Model (more detail in the full list of fermions).

Re:I'm just curious

[jgtg32a]

I'm unqualified as well, but this seems like it should have been answered in a manner.

What happens when antimatter is hit by a photon?

Re:I'm just curious

[bryan1945]

Disco?

Re:I'm just curious

[tragedy]

In terms of mass, density, etc. you would expect it to probably act like regular matter with similar properties, but because the electromagnetic charges are swapped, would it look like regular matter since optical properties are all about how matter interacts with electromagnetic radiation? Would antimatter gold be yellow and shiny? Would antimatter water ice be transparent? Would incandescently hot antimatter iron actually be incandescent? In the same frequencies? What would the magnetic properties of antimatter iron be? Would antimatter carbon-14 have the same radioactive decay rate as regular carbon-14? For that matter, carbon-14 decays into Nitrogen 14 through beta decay, releasing an electron and an electron antineutrino, so does that mean anti-carbon-14 undergoes beta decay to produce a positron and an electron neutrino? Is the symmetry really so exact in all other details? If it is, then why isn't the universe split evenly between matter and antimatter? Would the other properties really be the same?

It's normal to think of atoms in a fairly simplistic fashion, but they're really quite complex structures. Exactly the same, but just opposite charges? Easy to imagine it that way, just like it's easy to imagine the solar system working on Newtonian principles until you take detailed enough measurements and discover that the orbit of Mercury doesn't quite fit the model. It seems to me that really small differences could add up to quite big differences in things like crystalline structure. So maybe anti-iron could have similar properties to iron but it turns out the crystals don't stick to each other, so solid anti-iron objects fall apart into powder like tin at low temperatures. Maybe you can't make antimatter analogues of various compounds. Water seems like it should work, but what about complex long-chain molecules like DNA? I can't tell what the real answers are to most of these questions. I think it would be very interesting to know.

Re:I'm just curious

[John Hasler]

> ...gravity affects antimatter the same as matter.

Likely, but untested.

Re:1000 seconds

[nitehawk214]

Yes, here we are again with the journalistic conversions:
~100 m => 328.08 ft

No, a journalistic conversion would be:
100m = about a football field

I know what this is really about...

[arcsimm]

In a conference room, somewhere deep underground at CERN's Top Secret Command Center:

"Those bastards at Fermilab have discovered the Higgs Boson before we did! It's time to initiate... Plan Z."

"Sir, you't seriously mean to--!"

"Oh, but I do. PREPARE THE ANTIMATTER BOMB!"

[Disclaimer for the perdantic: I know the 150GeV bump is probably not the Higgs boson.]

Re:If that's not playing God

[siglercm]

Gotta love the usual religion bash. Let other people be, maybe? Maybe some of us are quite intelligent, is that at all possible?

What's funny to me isn't the religion bashing (which is a bit shop-worn by now, isn't it?). What's funny is the KJV bashing.

Breaking news: All translations of the original Hebrew and Koine Greek scriptures say the same thing, though one can argue some are expressed in the modern languages in a more liberal or more conservative way. The KJV is falling out of favor for its use of courtly or "Elizabethan" English, but is still the basic English bible of many Christian churches around the world. Its use (or abandonment) does not signify a "literal" interpretation, namely, one which ignores the understanding since before the Christian era that "Scripture should interpret Scripture."

Re:If that's not playing God

[siglercm]

According to numerous studies, while its not impossible to be intelligent and believe in god, it automatically deducts about 20 IQ points to have such a belief.

Huh? Citations of numerous publications or it didn't happen. Making stuff up doesn't automatically get you positive karma, even on /..

More provacatively: Only stupid atheists think anyone who believes in God is much more likely to be less intelligent than they are.

I weep for you, sir or madame.

next

[ILongForDarkness]

Photon torpedos.

Only 15 minutes

[drmofe]

...and then Vatican City will be consumed by light.

Re:Only 15 minutes

[MacGyver2210]

I am somehow not in any way against that prospect. Beam them all up, god.

Brown Like Dan

[sanman2]

Yes, but it will turn your pants Brown, like Dan

And in this corner!

[AlienIntelligence]

And in this corner! We have a new contender
on the scene... fighting for the title of Earth
Destroyer 2012!

We have Antimatter Containment!

Anti-matter Con-tain-ment!

Let's get ready to...
  (yeah, I don't want to get a letter).

-AI

Booooooooooring!

[martin-boundary]

Wake me up when they can do 1024 seconds!

Re:Booooooooooring!

[GameboyRMH]

Wake me up when they can do over two and a half hours.

Re:If that's not playing God

[siglercm]

According to numerous studies, while its not impossible to be intelligent and believe in god, it automatically deducts about 20 IQ points to have such a belief.

OK, formally calling shenanigans. This is just more "conventional wisdom" bullshit and it needs to be boldly refuted to one's face. See here. Comparing the quotes of Nyborg vs. Lynn (who have done similar research and worked together) is interesting:

Nyborg: "I'm not saying that believing in God makes you dumber. My hypothesis is that people with a low intelligence are more easily drawn toward religions, which give answers that are certain, while people with a high intelligence are more skeptical."

Lynn: "Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ. Academics have higher IQs than the general population. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQs tend not to believe in God."

Some points:

1. The difference in IQ is 5 or 6, not 20. Oops.
2. Nyborg's statement is weaker, Lynn's stronger, for correlation between IQ and lack of belief. But in neither case do the researchers say that faith means a person "automatically" has a lower IQ. You take a claim that goes in one direction and turn it around, and then make a stronger claim than either of these researchers themselves. (So that I'm not misunderstood, the Gallop polls referred to find those with higher IQs are less likely to believe in God, not that faith in God indicates a person has a lower IQ.) Oops II: Revenge of the Oops.
3. I'm not the biggest Wikipedia fan (unless one is quite naive, one understands that editors who are motivated enough to do a lot of work rarely have a NPOV; they work for some payoff which, more often than not, is supporting their own beliefs since, by and large, they aren't paid workers), but unless there are numerous-2 studies the article doesn't report on... well, the number of studies you claim falls a little short.

Re:If that's not playing God

[Ironhandx]

I worded it poorly, and 20 I did see somewhere in a study that measured athiests vs christians vs muslims vs Buddhists, with one or two other metrics thrown in. In relation to the Wikipedia article I can be arsed to dig up right now its actually just 6 points.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence

Re:If that's not playing God

[siglercm]

If you can read and write standardized English, thank the King James Bible. Few people are aware of this now 400 years after its publication. Happy anniversary, KJV!

The KJV is freely (as in libre and beer) available in many formats (PDF, plain txt, MS Word DOC and RTF, to name a few) over this new-fangled communications and data exchange medium called the Internet, for use on your PC or data pad. Printing? Now that may cost for materials and time/labor.

Re:If that's not playing God

[siglercm]

Where to start, given your failure to rebut my claims, your lack of self-awareness (not recognizing yourself in that particular XKCD with your own "rapid-fire" responses to me).... Sigh. In some ways, we are more alike, you and I.

One day you will be wiser, youngling, one day.... That will be a pleasing day for you :) Blessings.

Re:If that's not playing God

[siglercm]

I'll see about linking to those studies once I'm finished re-imaging my laptop.

I'm laughing quietly to myself now thinking about you re-imaging your laptop. Is that the special one you store all your atheist dogma and theology on? As Dr. Evil would say, is it an... evil... laptop? Semi-evil? Quasi-evil? The margarine of evil?

The end of the world will happen ...

[porky_pig_jr]

when they manage to synthesize Anti-Christ for more than a few seconds.

The Incredible Powers of Ten

[macraig]

"The more relevant number for physicists, who often deal in powers of 10...."

And what if their work doesn't involve base ten numeracy? What if they live on a planet where people only have eight fingers... and digits?

Re:The Incredible Powers of Ten

[John Hasler]

> And what if their work doesn't involve base ten numeracy?

Then we'd call them reporters.

Re:1000 seconds

[Lanteran]

Ugh, libraries of congress please? The length metric being all books in the library being stacked.

cnrs ups antimatter

[Darfeld]

That's three frightening groups of letters in a same sentence! The cnrs sending antimatter via ups? When will the madness stop?!!

Re:1000 seconds

[Noughmad]

I can't say about that, but in the other LoC units, it's about 28500

Re:If that's not playing God

[angel'o'sphere]

Well,

nevertheless it is a stupid asumption that atheists are more intelligent than believers. If at all, then people that are intelligent above average, are more likely to be atheists.

actually

[unity100]

a metric time system doesnt sound so bad.

Re:Incredibly important things.

[geraud]

Energy being on of the most important problems of years to come, it deserves the investment, even in economic crisis times. By the way, Europe still has money, as China is currently buying their debt. Same as the US, broke and living on the credit.

Which way does antimatter fall?

[GargamelSpaceman]

How close are they to being able to tell whether antimatter falls up or down?

Re:Which way does antimatter fall?

[cela0811]

It falls sideways.

Re:Which way does antimatter fall?

[vuo]

ALPHA/CERN claims an energy of "few eV" per particle. 1 eV corresponds to 11605 K, so it's still pretty hot, and would shine in bright blue, although mostly in ultraviolet. At this energy, the average speed is still about 13 km/s. Without containment, it would live some ~10 microseconds (72 micros/m). Even if the particles could be somehow collimated, this is still extremely fast to detect a drop due to gravity, since the drop would be about 25 nanometers per meter. That's not even a wavelength of visible light, but extreme UV; the width of a bacterial cell wall or flagellum, in other terms. Perhaps a method analogous to that used at Institut Laue-Langevin by Abele, Jenke et al. to measure the drop in neutrons could be used. Not as is, though, since it depends on hitting the neutron with a resonator - made of ordinary matter. I am nevertheless confident that some sort of a Rube Goldberg contraption will be made that does the same without matter contact.

Re:Incredibly important things.

[Electricity Likes Me]

Yeah it's not like there are any important applications dependent on us understanding the fundamental laws of the universe.

Re:If that's not playing God

[Ironhandx]

Thats how it is worded in the studies. I guess it must be less inflammatory that way.

However you just said the same thing twice.

Re:Incredibly important things.

[Magada]

Yeah and it's not like anyone is going to repeat Hitler's mistake and go for the civilian applications first. Debts? What debts? Our DEBTS are now backed by ANTIMATTER WEAPONS!

Re:Incredibly important things.

[jgtg32a]

I seem to remember reading that Antimatter can't really be used for energy production because the reactions are too violent. I'm completely unqualified to say either way, but it was an interesting statement. So if that statement is true, it is going to be for bombs and spaceship propulsion.

Doubtful

[sean.peters]

Sure, they stored it for 15 minutes or so, but what they stored was 7 atoms. Even a matter-antimatter annihilation of 7 atoms is not going to propel the space shuttle. And they had to create many thousands of such atoms just to catch the 7.

So what you're saying is

[sean.peters]

... that if we spent billions and billions of dollars solving this "engineering problem", we'd be able to... do the same stuff we can already do with chemical propellants and or nuclear explosives? I can't imagine why no one's taken you up on this.

Re:So what you're saying is

[cduffy]

Until you can achieve total matter->energy conversion *without* antimatter, nothing else comes remotely close in terms of thrust-to-reaction-mass efficiency; as such, antimatter could be used in situations where chemical or conventional nuclear systems would be unsuitable (designing a vehicle which can carry enough fuel to escape a steep gravity well, for instance).

To be sure, it's wildly, tremendously inefficient in terms of generation-side energy expenditures -- but no conventional nuclear or chemical reactions come remotely close. Exotic materials may not be used in everyday situations, but they certainly have their place -- military or "big science" projects have a great deal of history of leveraging such things.

There are also medical imaging applications, which may be feasible if the optimistic $25mil/gram estimates come to eventually be grounded in truth.

Dude, did you read your own post?

[sean.peters]

then the current electricity output of the US (roughly a terawatt averaged over a year) could produce a kilogram of antimatter every 7-8 months or so.

then

Still that's roughly 3 billion usd per megaton of explosive power (just in energy cost at $0.05 per kWh). I see antimatter bombs not filling the roles of the 250kton-1 megaton bombs (or larger), but things on the order of compact 0.1-1 kiloton bombs (useful for shattering deep underground structures). Much cheaper and fills a niche that currently isn't covered by nuclear or conventional weapons.

You've conveniently omitted the cost of, you know, replacing the entire electricity supply of the United States. Or did you think the entire rest of the economy was just going to shut down for a year while you diverted ALL the electric power to building this thing? Not to mention the R&D costs associated with going from 7 atoms stored for 15 minutes to Avogadro's number of atoms stored for years, then being released on command. There's also the possibility that antimatter wouldn't even WORK as a bomb - there have been some simulations that have shown that the initial annihilation reactions would disperse the remaining antimatter to the point that you get something more like a deflagration than an explosion.

Destroying deep bunkers: still a lot cheaper with existing technology.

Re:Dude, did you read your own post?

[khallow]

You've conveniently omitted the cost of, you know, replacing the entire electricity supply of the United States.

The cost of the infrastructure is incorporated into the rate of $0.05 per kWh. Producing anti-matter might be a good activity for renewable electricity generation since it doesn't require the electricity be produced at a particular time.

the real question

[sean.peters]

Is why you would want to, when the fission triggers we have now work just fine, and their R&D is already paid for.

Re:the real question

[ppanon]

The fission triggers we have now are radioactive and shielding requires lots of mass, reducing portability. The former isn't a problem with ICBMs, and the latter is generally considered a bonus if you're trying to prevent terrorism. But maybe there would be alternative applications to a mostly thermic explosion without large quantities of radioactive fission products.

I'm pretty sure they're looking for small changes

[sean.peters]

No one, as far as I can tell, seriously think that antimatter has negative mass or any other seriously far out behavior. They're looking for very small differences in how an antihydrogen atom responds to gravity, not whether it would "fall up".

Cool

[bryan1945]

Now where's my warp drive?

Mod parent up.

[John Hasler]

n/t

Re:Oblig XKCD

[khallow]

You ignore that once you have the infrastructure in place to marry a husband, then marrying a few dozen husbands is a far simpler matter. There's no analogous rule against producing antimatter as there is against marrying multiple men.