It increases the rate of production of neutral antihydrogen from antiprotons and positrons by a factor of 8. It doesn't increase the efficiency of production of antiprotons, which is the extremely inefficient, energy intensive part.
If you have a process where it takes 5MW to produce one component and 80KW to convert that component into the final product, and you increase the efficiency of the second step 8 times so it only takes 10KW, that's real and awesome, but still almost irrelevant to the overall efficiency of the process. I have no idea what the actual numbers are, just stating the general concept.
Conversely efficiency is a lot less important if it unlocks capability you otherwise don't have at all.
Antimatter is a unique element: nothing else can do what it does. The game changer would be producing industrially useful amounts for further experimentation.
(Antimatter chemistry would be incredibly interesting and quite possibly a practical way to actually use antimatter - shoot the beam into a reaction or solid matrix to do interesting reactions due to the electronic properties before it annihilates).
This article is about an efficiency gain, not about any new source of antimatter or any newly discovered property or reaction. And, getting industrial levels will require massive efficiency gains, so we're back to this discussion.
They cut production time to a given number of anti-atoms from 10 weeks to 7 hours by improving the electron cooling, just from this fact it is a bit rich to insist the anti-proton generation is the limiting factor.
Going to the paper itself we can observe that the CERN Antiproton Decelerator can deliver 10^7 antiprotons every 2 minutes. Remembering it previously took 10 weeks to capture 10^4 anti-atoms, I hope you forgive me for not agreeing that the antiproton generation is the source of important inefficiencies.
Now we can make a firecracker's worth of antimatter (by annihilation energy) in a mere two hundred thousand years of continuous production. Super cool stuff though, pun intended.
Antimatter is more of a Star Trek (and Revelation Space and a few others) issue than a Black Mirror episode.
I am far from a domain expert, I only know of four current and speculated uses for antimatter: energy storage, inducing nuclear reactions, medical imaging, and one specific tumour removal method.
For the first one, antimatter has about 1000x the energy density of fission, but also unlike a fission bomb all of it reacts (with an equal mass of normal matter), which means 1 gram of the stuff is a bigger boom than Fat Man and Little Boy combined.
Fortunately, "15000 antihydrogen atoms" is a factor of 4e19 away from 1 gram, and even if it wasn't we'd probably have to fuse the antihydrogen into antilithium to hold that much in a not completely absurd storage system.
Inducing nuclear reactions might make for some interesting propulsion systems, or might make atomic weapon proliferation even harder to prevent; that's expected at around 10^18 (the microgram level), which is still 1e14 more than announced by CERN — if it works, this use is hypothetical because current production is so much less than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter-catalyzed_nuclear_p...
Medical imaging is already done with positron sources (doesn't need complete antihydrogen atoms), and antiproton beam therapy doesn't need the antiprotons to be turned into antihydrogen at any point: https://home.cern/science/experiments/ace etc.
As a luddite, when I get in to my car to drive to work, I harness the power of several hundred violent explosions per minute in order for my non-science fiction car to get to work. If I had a homelab sized source of anti-matter violent explosions, youtube university in this hypothetical universe could help me harness it into something that generates electricity or something fun and useful, and not for killing people.
If your car suffers a catastrophic exothermic event with its fuel, that looks like a car fire.
If the same energy explodes as antimatter, to the extent that it is not radiation shielded what you get is a pulse of high-energy ionising radiation*; while to the extent that it is radiation shielded, it looks like order-of as many kg of TNT as the number of kWh stored, give or take.
* with a note that 10 joules of absorbed energy per kg of body mass is "if you're lucky you will fall into a coma and die in about a week, if you're unlucky you'll be conscious", and that 1 litre of ICE fuel ~= 10 kWh = 36 megajoules.
if produced in BIG enough quantities, very small reactors. As far as AM cannot be mined, but only produced at high price, currently it would matter only for deep space and bombs where we have RTG-s for deep space.
PET scan
(You have to wait for civic applications of the newly discovered technologies for a while, but the "technology transfer" from CERN to practical applications has a few notable examples.)
PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. The radioactive tracers emit positrons (antimatter), which then annihilate with electrons to produce the gamma rays that are detected. So it does use antimatter, just indirectly through the decay process.
I am familiar with PET. As we both agree, PET does not use antimatter directly, so this article is irrelevant to it (which is what the original comment was asking about).
Indeed, it would be quite difficult to smuggle some antimatter to a tumor. I'm saying that research in this particular area eventually led to practical application, PET scans.
The most realistic sci-fi engines are nuclear pulse engines where you ride the shockwaves of thousands of fusion bombs to reach a few percent of the speed of light. Those we could probably build right now if we were willing to spend the money. Replacing the fusion bombs with antimatter bombs would be a nice improvement for the basic design
Is there a way to slow down using fusion bombs? Even if you manage to bring thousands of fusion bombs with you? Sounds like this is only a sensible approach for sending probes, which will then zip by their target at huge speeds.
If you can get any kind of spaceship up to speeds to reach other stars within reasonable time - you've got an amazing weapon. Just ram into something at full speed. Ok, if you have enough energy to correct course to aim, only.
In all (realistic) interplanetary space travel - not to mention interstellar - the difference between the largest bomb/death ray anyone has ever experienced and a better drive, is purely a matter of where you aim it and when/how you throttle it up.
The most hilarious part of the expanse for instance is how they didn’t really use their actual drives as weapons even in CQB, which is quite a waste!
Not actually that different for rockets now, frankly, we just usually don’t operate direct nuclear fission/fusion drives right now for this very reason and our own sense of self preservation.
There certainly are plans on the drawing board!
It would take 23 grams of antimatter to produce the effect of a 1 megaton nuclear bomb, and the biggest factor stopping someone is both production of the matter itself (improving) and actual shielding technology (magnetic bottles good enough to effectively trap that much antimatter are huge and extremely energy consuming right now - much bigger than a fusion bomb of equivalent power).
Theoretically, it should be possible to store that much in a thermos bottle, however. We just need better superconductor technology.
It increases the rate of production of neutral antihydrogen from antiprotons and positrons by a factor of 8. It doesn't increase the efficiency of production of antiprotons, which is the extremely inefficient, energy intensive part.
The output got increased by a factor of 8, did the energy consuption increase proportionately? If not, its an efficiency gain.
If you have a process where it takes 5MW to produce one component and 80KW to convert that component into the final product, and you increase the efficiency of the second step 8 times so it only takes 10KW, that's real and awesome, but still almost irrelevant to the overall efficiency of the process. I have no idea what the actual numbers are, just stating the general concept.
Conversely efficiency is a lot less important if it unlocks capability you otherwise don't have at all.
Antimatter is a unique element: nothing else can do what it does. The game changer would be producing industrially useful amounts for further experimentation.
(Antimatter chemistry would be incredibly interesting and quite possibly a practical way to actually use antimatter - shoot the beam into a reaction or solid matrix to do interesting reactions due to the electronic properties before it annihilates).
This article is about an efficiency gain, not about any new source of antimatter or any newly discovered property or reaction. And, getting industrial levels will require massive efficiency gains, so we're back to this discussion.
It's about a production rate increase, not an efficiency gain.
They cut production time to a given number of anti-atoms from 10 weeks to 7 hours by improving the electron cooling, just from this fact it is a bit rich to insist the anti-proton generation is the limiting factor.
Going to the paper itself we can observe that the CERN Antiproton Decelerator can deliver 10^7 antiprotons every 2 minutes. Remembering it previously took 10 weeks to capture 10^4 anti-atoms, I hope you forgive me for not agreeing that the antiproton generation is the source of important inefficiencies.
Now we can make a firecracker's worth of antimatter (by annihilation energy) in a mere two hundred thousand years of continuous production. Super cool stuff though, pun intended.
What are the civilian applications?
Performing precision tests of fundamental physics by verifying that antimatter behaves as predicted by standard theory.
None for the foreseeable future I hope.
Why is that? I must have missed the episode of black mirror you watched that would make that a bad thing.
Antimatter is more of a Star Trek (and Revelation Space and a few others) issue than a Black Mirror episode.
I am far from a domain expert, I only know of four current and speculated uses for antimatter: energy storage, inducing nuclear reactions, medical imaging, and one specific tumour removal method.
For the first one, antimatter has about 1000x the energy density of fission, but also unlike a fission bomb all of it reacts (with an equal mass of normal matter), which means 1 gram of the stuff is a bigger boom than Fat Man and Little Boy combined.
Fortunately, "15000 antihydrogen atoms" is a factor of 4e19 away from 1 gram, and even if it wasn't we'd probably have to fuse the antihydrogen into antilithium to hold that much in a not completely absurd storage system.
Inducing nuclear reactions might make for some interesting propulsion systems, or might make atomic weapon proliferation even harder to prevent; that's expected at around 10^18 (the microgram level), which is still 1e14 more than announced by CERN — if it works, this use is hypothetical because current production is so much less than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter-catalyzed_nuclear_p...
Medical imaging is already done with positron sources (doesn't need complete antihydrogen atoms), and antiproton beam therapy doesn't need the antiprotons to be turned into antihydrogen at any point: https://home.cern/science/experiments/ace etc.
Well what is the most obvious application of a highly volatile energy dense substance?
This substance can basically only do two things.
1) whatever ordinary hydrogen can
2) explode violently on contact with matter
Sure it's interesting to test 1) from a physics research point of view, but 2) is the only practical application that I know of.
As a luddite, when I get in to my car to drive to work, I harness the power of several hundred violent explosions per minute in order for my non-science fiction car to get to work. If I had a homelab sized source of anti-matter violent explosions, youtube university in this hypothetical universe could help me harness it into something that generates electricity or something fun and useful, and not for killing people.
If your car suffers a catastrophic exothermic event with its fuel, that looks like a car fire.
If the same energy explodes as antimatter, to the extent that it is not radiation shielded what you get is a pulse of high-energy ionising radiation*; while to the extent that it is radiation shielded, it looks like order-of as many kg of TNT as the number of kWh stored, give or take.
* with a note that 10 joules of absorbed energy per kg of body mass is "if you're lucky you will fall into a coma and die in about a week, if you're unlucky you'll be conscious", and that 1 litre of ICE fuel ~= 10 kWh = 36 megajoules.
Propulsion with antimatter drives is another application. That’s not consumer-facing though.
if produced in BIG enough quantities, very small reactors. As far as AM cannot be mined, but only produced at high price, currently it would matter only for deep space and bombs where we have RTG-s for deep space.
PET scan (You have to wait for civic applications of the newly discovered technologies for a while, but the "technology transfer" from CERN to practical applications has a few notable examples.)
PET doesn't use antimatter, at least it doesn't use it directly. It uses regular radioactive tracers.
PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. The radioactive tracers emit positrons (antimatter), which then annihilate with electrons to produce the gamma rays that are detected. So it does use antimatter, just indirectly through the decay process.
I am familiar with PET. As we both agree, PET does not use antimatter directly, so this article is irrelevant to it (which is what the original comment was asking about).
Indeed, it would be quite difficult to smuggle some antimatter to a tumor. I'm saying that research in this particular area eventually led to practical application, PET scans.
Quite difficult, but also already in experiment: https://home.cern/science/experiments/ace
That cloud of laser-cooled beryllium ions would probably be great for overclocking.
In simple terms for humanists, does that brings us closer in anyway to scifi engines?:)
The most realistic sci-fi engines are nuclear pulse engines where you ride the shockwaves of thousands of fusion bombs to reach a few percent of the speed of light. Those we could probably build right now if we were willing to spend the money. Replacing the fusion bombs with antimatter bombs would be a nice improvement for the basic design
I think the more "practical" idea is to replace the fission stage of a fusion bomb with antimatter annihilation.
i.e.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter-catalyzed_nuclear_p..., although it doesn't really replace the primary, just decreases the required quantity.
Is there a way to slow down using fusion bombs? Even if you manage to bring thousands of fusion bombs with you? Sounds like this is only a sensible approach for sending probes, which will then zip by their target at huge speeds.
you just need to speed up in the opposite direction by flipping around and firing bombs on the other side.
Which means if we get discovered by an alien probe it will look a lot like getting on the wrong end of a nuclear war.
I remember there was a quote from some sci-fi universe that there's "no such thing as an unarmed space ship".
I believe that is the "Kzinti Lesson" from Larry Niven:
"A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeaponizedExhaus...
If you can get any kind of spaceship up to speeds to reach other stars within reasonable time - you've got an amazing weapon. Just ram into something at full speed. Ok, if you have enough energy to correct course to aim, only.
It’s more than twice(1) as easy to make a rocket-propelled bullet than a rocket-propelled vehicle!
1) It’d be exactly twice as easy but for Tsiolkovsky!
Thanks for explanation!
How do you do that and not die?
Long stick and radiation shield between you and the bombs
Isn't it the path to a yet deadlier bomb ? #alwaysLookOnTheBrightSideOfLife
In all (realistic) interplanetary space travel - not to mention interstellar - the difference between the largest bomb/death ray anyone has ever experienced and a better drive, is purely a matter of where you aim it and when/how you throttle it up.
The most hilarious part of the expanse for instance is how they didn’t really use their actual drives as weapons even in CQB, which is quite a waste!
Not actually that different for rockets now, frankly, we just usually don’t operate direct nuclear fission/fusion drives right now for this very reason and our own sense of self preservation.
There certainly are plans on the drawing board!
It would take 23 grams of antimatter to produce the effect of a 1 megaton nuclear bomb, and the biggest factor stopping someone is both production of the matter itself (improving) and actual shielding technology (magnetic bottles good enough to effectively trap that much antimatter are huge and extremely energy consuming right now - much bigger than a fusion bomb of equivalent power).
Theoretically, it should be possible to store that much in a thermos bottle, however. We just need better superconductor technology.
Just be-fore you draw your terminal breath ♫
[dead]
No. Unless you find a chunk of antimatter or a way to break the laws of physics.
it brings us 1 order of magnitude closer
10 more to go!
I just finished Angels and Demons ffs
And what do we do with it? This isn't star trek, I can't just go shove this into my warp drive and blast off... /shrug
These intermediate steps are important to the development of new technologies