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CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

arstechnica.com

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Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#91

Post by asicsarecool »

dwayne_dibley wrote: post #51
pezezin wrote: post #17

Last 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.

I designed some of the kit in that building! (Specifically for the alpha G experiment) Super proud of it.

Not bad for a cat, nice work. Clearly you don't work in the cybernetics division.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#92

Post by tempaway43563 »

djaychela wrote: post #69

Not sure why, but I found it amusing when they said that the antimatter "reached speeds of over 40 km/hour." Not sure what the speeds are at the point of its creation (there are knowledgeable folks on here who will know, I'm sure), but that must seem sloooooow in comparison.

The point was that the van driving around with the containment device reached 40mph and this establishes that the containment device can handle a bit of rattling around

They only had regular Protons in it for this test though. The point was to see if the Protons were still there after the 40 mph journey in a van

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#93

Post by aredox »

mlindner wrote: post #42
pezezin wrote: post #17

Last 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.

I've seen this expressed before, but every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures? To me things like tokamak fusion reactors or rockets or even places like the massive piles of pipe work outside of SpaceX's launch site feel way cooler.

>So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures?

Yes: it is massive. There are few bigger experimental setups in the world.

A telescope is "just a mirror", yet any modern large telescope is awe-inspiring by virtue of its size.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#94

Post by Cthulhu_ »

zombot wrote: post #55

What will be the blast radius if there is an accident?

I'm not an expert but, E=MC², so take the weight what they're moving around, multiply it by the speed of light squared, that's the amount of joules of energy you have, assuming perfect conversion.

It doesn't say how much material they moved though. If it was exactly 1 gram and they cancelled each other out perfectly (according to a quora answer, I refuse to trust AI but a random internet commenter is fine lmao), you've got 2 grams of mass converted to energy which is 180 terajoules or about 43 kilotons, which is about equivalent to 3 Hiroshima bombs.

Punching that into https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ gives a blast radius (of window destroying power) of 5.79 kilometers, or just over 100 km² of affected area.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#95

Post by meindnoch »

fecal_henge wrote: post #74

A Nobel prize is due to the first person that proves whether exporting antimatter results in negative import duties or not.

I would argue that antimatter still has the same mass as regular matter, so you have to pay regular import duties. On the other hand, if tachyons exist, they would have imaginary mass, for which the import duties would have to paid in imaginary money!

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#96

Post by virgildotcodes »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #94
zombot wrote: post #55

What will be the blast radius if there is an accident?

I'm not an expert but, E=MC², so take the weight what they're moving around, multiply it by the speed of light squared, that's the amount of joules of energy you have, assuming perfect conversion. It doesn't say how much material they moved though. If it was exactly 1 gram and they cancelled each other out perfectly (according to a quora answer, I refuse to trust AI but a random internet commenter is fine lmao), you'…

They’re going to be shipping around much less than a gram. We haven’t generated close to a gram in total across all particle accelerators on earth so far.

Producing a gram would cost ~$2.7 quadrillion - https://ket.org/program/physics-girl/why-this-stuff-costs-27...

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#97

Post by 317070 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #94
zombot wrote: post #55

What will be the blast radius if there is an accident?

I'm not an expert but, E=MC², so take the weight what they're moving around, multiply it by the speed of light squared, that's the amount of joules of energy you have, assuming perfect conversion. It doesn't say how much material they moved though. If it was exactly 1 gram and they cancelled each other out perfectly (according to a quora answer, I refuse to trust AI but a random internet commenter is fine lmao), you'…

lol at having 1 gram of antimatter. They are moving around dozens of atoms here. 1 gram of antimatter is off on humanity's capabilities by roughly a dozen orders of magnitude.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#98

Post by pif »

> There's a facility being built in Düsseldorf, Germany ... [and shipping] appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work

That "just" is not just a "just"! As far as I understand, given the low reserves of helium we have, using a largish quantity for an experiment must be a political decision as much as it has to be a technical one.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#99

Post by HPsquared »

andy_ppp wrote: post #76
fecal_henge wrote: post #74

A Nobel prize is due to the first person that proves whether exporting antimatter results in negative import duties or not.

Clearly it would result in tariffs paid in anti-money…

Just like matter and antimatter, money and anti-money (debt) are created and destroyed together, and cancel each other out. When they come in contact, both are deleted.

All money creation, pretty much, is accompanied with creating a corresponding debt.

Bankruptcy sometimes deletes anti-money but the 'money' stays. I'm not sure what role interest payments have (I think that's a case of transferring money around). The bankruptcy thing seems a bit like baryon asymmetry.

Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe

#100

Post by lostlogin »

BrenBarn wrote: post #89
pezezin wrote: post #17

Last 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.

> The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive. Also the persistence that is required because of the low "return on investment" is staggering. Another article linked from this one said: > The authors had to mix 10 million positrons with 700 million antiprotons in order to get get 38 certifiable antihydrogen events.

> picograms

I needed to know how much antimatter weighed and this article seemed helpful (though I am poorly placed to know if it’s correct).

https://gizmodo.com/how-much-does-antimatter-weigh-492195828

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