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CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
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Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#22If you can ship antimatter, you can drop it on people. Luckily, we are still orders of magnitude away from a bomb-sized amount.
What's the biggest barrier to creating a lot of antimatter?
Nothing we do creates it at any kind of scale, and it's a pain in the ass to store.
Not to mention the only way to create it is with energy (it doesn't exist on Earth), and we can only do so at terrible efficiencies. So even theoretically it's pretty bad.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#23If you can ship antimatter, you can drop it on people. Luckily, we are still orders of magnitude away from a bomb-sized amount.
What's the biggest barrier to creating a lot of antimatter?
Energy. Creating a single anti-hydrogen atom requires an absurd amount of energy to first create a collision in a particle accelerator and then capture that anti-hydrogen before it eliminates against another atom.
Only about 0.01% of the energy used to operate the particle collider creates antimatter, the vast majority of which is impossible to capture. All in all, the efficiency of the entire process - if you were to measure it in the e^2=(pc)^2+(mc^2)^2 sense - is probably on the order of 1e-9 or worse.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#24Last week I had the chance to visit CERN's Antimatter Factory, and let me tell you I was feeling like a child on Christmas Day. The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive. That they are considering sending it hundreds of km away is mind blowing.
That's awesome. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting CERN too. Curious, what part of the visit stood out as especially impressive? Last I checked, there was a pretty long waiting list for tours.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#25> If the delivery can be made successfully—and it appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work—the new facility in Germany should allow measurements with a precision of over 100 times better than anything that has been achieved at CERN. Hmm. It sounds good until you realize that's two decimal places. Two decimal places is a pretty marginal gain for a lot of work.
2 decimal places is the difference between employment and ownership. 100k vs 10MM. That is the comparison you really want to think about.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#26> If the delivery can be made successfully—and it appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work—the new facility in Germany should allow measurements with a precision of over 100 times better than anything that has been achieved at CERN. Hmm. It sounds good until you realize that's two decimal places. Two decimal places is a pretty marginal gain for a lot of work.
Two decimal places is a shit ton of precision though. A one inch gap is immense compared to a .01 inch gap.
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Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#27If you can ship antimatter, you can drop it on people. Luckily, we are still orders of magnitude away from a bomb-sized amount.
Making antimatter bombs really doesn't make sense. We can only make miniscule amounts of the stuff at very high cost.
If you want evil bombs, we already have nukes.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#28Why is there not a picture of the antimatter containment device? I hope it looks appropriately sci-fi.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#29Why is there not a picture of the antimatter containment device? I hope it looks appropriately sci-fi.
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Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#30If you can ship antimatter, you can drop it on people. Luckily, we are still orders of magnitude away from a bomb-sized amount.
Making antimatter bombs really doesn't make sense. We can only make miniscule amounts of the stuff at very high cost. If you want evil bombs, we already have nukes.
Also, the amount of antimatter storable in a Penning Trap is limited such that its mass energy is comparable to the stored magnetic energy of the trap, which is small compared to the energy released by the same mass (as of the trap) of high explosives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma
(see discussion of the "Brillouin Limit")