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,

[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,

[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,

[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.

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: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 ?

Which way does antimatter fall?

[GargamelSpaceman]

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