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

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,

[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,

[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,

[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,

[jdpars]

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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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 ?

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.

[BergZ]

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

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?

it blows at the of 38min give or take

[Joe_Dragon]

it blows at the of 38min give or take

Which way does antimatter fall?

[GargamelSpaceman]

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