Earlier quoted context omitted.
You wouldn't need anything near a gram. It isn't used for its explosive power but to create particles to increase the efficiency of the surrounding nuclear reaction, not actually contribute any explosive force on its own.
Do you have a link that explais that? Asking for a friend.
CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
181–188 of 188 posts
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#182I got curious. If you put 1 picogram into Einstein's equation, you get about 90 joules of energy on annihilation. That's a bit more than half the energy delivered by a 90mph baseball or about half the energy of a defibrillator pulse.
Or wait, do you double it since you're annihilating a picogram of matter and antimatter?
Either way, that's a bonkers amount of energy from picograms of mass.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#183Isn’t it dangerous to transport antimatter in a truck? What would happen if it got into a bad accident?
A picogram of antimatter carries about as much energy as a 90mph fastball. About 180 joules.
The energy released by an automobile collision is roughly 10 to 100 times that much.
Imagine you're in a car crash and someone throws a big rock at the side of your vehicle. Or you're driving and a bird hits the windshield. That's the sort of scale we're looking at here, it's really not catastrophic.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
2 decimal places is the difference between employment and ownership. 100k vs 10MM. That is the comparison you really want to think about.
No, 100k and 10,000k each have one decimal place. Two decimal places is the difference between 100k and 104k.
Wouldn't it be the difference between 100k and 140k? 105k rounded to lose two decimals of precision would still be 100k.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#185> 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.
Everybody think that the properties of a proton and an antiproton are equal. As far as we know, that is true, but it's better to confirm that experimentally, and we need more precision to detect subtle differences. Two more decimals places would be nice. There are a few properties of other particles with like 8 decimal places calculated theoretically and measured experimentally, and they are useful to validate the cu…
Too late to edit: I think the note [1] needs to be fixed. I think it's a cycle of quarks, down -> strange -> bottom -> down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark#Weak_interaction Anyway, before constructing a giant particle accelerator to measure that, better ask a particle physics expert :) .
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make an antimatter liquid with strong intra-molecular bonds (e.g. anti-H2O) that is only slightly ionized. That would be easier to contain magnetically.
How do you propose to do that? Getting any antielement beyond antihydrogen would require doing nuclear fusion on antiprotons.
Which is hard but theoretically possible.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you propose to do that? Getting any antielement beyond antihydrogen would require doing nuclear fusion on antiprotons.
Which is hard but theoretically possible.
Fusion of protons is theoretically possible in the sense of you can theoretically build a star from antihydrogen. Laboratory fusion of protons is very unlikely ever to be practical. The "S factor" (representing the fusion cross section aside from geometric and tunneling rate factors) for pp fusion is something like 24 orders of magnitude smaller than for DD fusion.
Re: CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is hard but theoretically possible.
Fusion of protons is theoretically possible in the sense of you can theoretically build a star from antihydrogen. Laboratory fusion of protons is very unlikely ever to be practical. The "S factor" (representing the fusion cross section aside from geometric and tunneling rate factors) for pp fusion is something like 24 orders of magnitude smaller than for DD fusion.
I'll add that maybe one could achieve fusion in a different way, by a means that's highly wasteful of energy. After all, the goal here is to get the fused nucleus, not achieve net energy production in doing so (as is the goal in fusion of ordinary nuclei).
Here, one might exploit the reaction p(p,pi+)d (or, rather, it's antimatter equivalent, which makes a negative pion), at a center of mass energy above threshold for creating the charged pion (which has a mass of 139.579 MeV. This is wildly energy negative, but if one has already invested many GeV in making each antiproton that's presumably acceptable. The cross section for this reaction is only ~200 microbarns, but that will be many orders of magnitude higher than the ordinary fusion cross section.
The solid antimatter one would probably target as an end goal would be anti-(lithium hydride).