'Antimatter' discovery: how physicists explore science fiction frontier

[cory777]

Source: Telegraph

Researchers at the European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN), in Geneva claimed that had trapped dozens of hydrogen "antimatter" atoms, a technical feat that significantly boosts research into one of the great puzzles of particle physics

Scientists say antimatter is identical to matter but everything within its atoms is the opposite, with negative charge being positive and left becoming right.

Antimatter is ordinary matter in reverse. Atoms normally consist of positively charged nuclei and negatively charged orbiting electrons. Their antimatter counterparts have negatively charged nuclei and positively charged electrons.

Under a theory expounded in 1928 by the eccentric British physicist Paul Dirac, when energy transforms into matter, it produces a particle and its mirror image - called an anti-particle - which holds the opposite electrical charge.

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8142104/Antimatter-discovery-how-physicists-explore-science-fiction-frontier.html

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Uncensored Alternative News http://activistnews.blogspot.com/

[Poll_Blind]

1. The latter part of the article goes into commercial exploitation of anti-matter as an energy source.

As though we'd skip the militarization part.

:rofl:

PB

[Posteritatis]

12. Neither's feasible anytime even vaguely soon anyway

This is a stage where having a couple dozen atoms for a tiny fraction of a second is considered a big deal. Nobody's going to be cramming "useful" amounts into warheads anytime soon; there'd be no point even if it wouldn't be ludicrously expensive beyond anyone's comprehension and impossibly dangerous.

[cory777]

2. CERN's press release

Geneva, 17 November 2011. The ALPHA experiment at CERN1 has taken an important step forward in developing techniques to understand one of the Universe’s open questions: is there a difference between matter and antimatter? In a paper published in Nature today, the collaboration shows that it has successfully produced and trapped atoms of antihydrogen. This development opens the path to new ways of making detailed measurements of antihydrogen, which will in turn allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter.

Antimatter – or the lack of it – remains one of the biggest mysteries of science. Matter and its counterpart are identical except for opposite charge, and they annihilate when they meet. At the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been produced in equal amounts. However, we know that our world is made up of matter: antimatter seems to have disappeared. To find out what has happened to it, scientists employ a range of methods to investigate whether a tiny difference in the properties of matter and antimatter could point towards an explanation.

One of these methods is to take one of the best-known systems in physics, the hydrogen atom, which is made of one proton and one electron, and check whether its antimatter counterpart, antihydrogen, consisting of an antiproton and a positron, behaves in the same way. CERN is the only laboratory in the world with a dedicated low-energy antiproton facility where this research can be carried out.

The antihydrogen programme goes back a long way. In 1995, the first nine atoms of man-made antihydrogen were produced at CERN. Then, in 2002, the ATHENA and ATRAP experiments showed that it was possible to produce antihydrogen in large quantities, opening up the possibility of conducting detailed studies. The new result from ALPHA is the latest step in this journey.

read more: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2010/PR22.10E.html

[eridani]

8. The Large Hadron Collider Rap has become a serious brain worm

Now anti-matter's sort of like matter's evil twin
Because except for charge and handedness of spin
They're the same for a particle and its anti-self
But you can't store antiparticle on any shelf

'Cause when it meets its normal twin they both annihilate
Matter turns to energy and then it dissipates
But when they make matter from energy
Which is exactly what they'll do with the LHC

You get matter and antimatter in equal parts
And they'll try to take it back to where the universe starts
The big bang--back when all the matter exploded
But the amount of antimatter was somehow eroded

And when we look around we see that matter abounds
And the antimatter's nowhere to be found!

[NBachers]

3. Maybe we can devise antirepublican and release it throughout the land

[ForeignSpectator]

4. That once existed, it was called "Democrat"

And its release throughout the land stopped 1963.

[happygoluckytoyou]

20. it ain't anti-matter.... it JUST DON'T MATTER NO MORE... and that's different

[Hawkowl]

5. Now we can build warp engines!

Oh. And photon torpedoes.

[Supply Side Jesus]

6. No No No No No

The anti-matter is merely the fuel used to power the warp engine! Gawd! ;) :silly: :dunce: :crazy:

You better attend your nerd class, asap

[northernlights]

9. first you get the fuel

then you build the engine, not the other way around. Which came first, the horse or the carriage? Which came first, the dog or the sled? Which came first, the steam or the engine? Which came first, the oil or the auto? Who needs to attend nerd class, anyway? :blush: :dunce: :silly: :D

[AsahinaKimi]

19. Yah but...

Where do we get the dilithium crystals?



http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/Camelot/Engines/Dilithium.html

[happygoluckytoyou]

21. which came first, the dog or the sled? THE DOG OF COURSE.... otherwise he'd be PUSHING the sled !!!

[Judi Lynn]

7. Scientists claim breakthrough in antimatter hunt

Scientists claim breakthrough in antimatter hunt
The Associated Press
Thursday, November 18, 2010; 4:37 AM

GENEVA -- Scientists at the world's biggest physics lab say they have achieved a breakthrough in the hunt for antimatter.

An international team of physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva say they created an entire atom made of antimatter and then for the first time managed to hold onto it.

A spokesman for the experiment says scientists will now try to compare this "anti-atom" with a regular hydrogen atom in order to understand the properties of antimatter.

Jeffrey Hangst told The Associated Press on Thursday this may help scientists understand why the antimatter that was created in equal amounts as matter by the Big Bang seems to have disappeared.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/18/AR2010111800884.html

[northernlights]

10. yippee! now we can blow up *anything*!

how long will it take? :scared:

[DetlefK]

11. how to build an anti-matter warhead (and why it's not worth the effort)

You have to store anti-matter without touching it and only few technologies can provide that, like a laser-trap or a magnetic bottle.
Put short: storing anti-matter takes up space and an electronic system for controlling it's prison. If the power source fails, if the warhead gets shaken, if the vacuum becomes compromised, if there's an electronic glitch or a computer virus...


And for its effect: Little Boy, the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, had an energy content of 13 kt equivalent-TNT.
With 1 kt eq.-TNT = 4.184*10¹² J and E=mc² that's an equivalent to 46 Microgramm of anti-matter, which would have the size of a corn of dust (in solid form).


EDIT: I just realized a major problem: You have to store anti-matter in vacuum and I can tell from my lab-experience that maintaining an ultra-high vacuum is a lot of effort. Apart from the gas coming from inside the metallic walls, there are also air-molecules tunneling through the walls into the vacuum. If you are very lucky, your warhead would have an expiry date of a few years.

[northernlights]

13. I'll take that to mean "not any time soon or in my lifetime"

and that climate change will probably get us first. Phew! Thanks...;)

[Pab Sungenis]

14. So you don't "fuel" the warheads until shortly before use.

This makes a whole new problem: antimatter weapons would almost never be good defensive weapons, but amazing offensive ones.

[Posteritatis]

15. So where do you keep the stuff until then?

You can't just flick a "let there be 500 grams of antimatter" switch - or a "let there be 500 picograms of antimatter" switch, for that matter. If you could you'd still have the problem of the costs and risks of storing what is in all likelihood literally the most unstable, reactive substance that the universe as we know it can contain, both of which scale in proportion to how much of the stuff you're trying to carry around.

I suppose people could jump through all those hoops, creating weapons that would be inconceivably more expensive than their equivalent ow factor of conventional explosives, storing the fuel in situations which have to be more perfectly safe than anything we have these days including modern chemical weapons and the remaining smallpox virus stores - and that's before considering the certainty of nuclear retaliation for them - or they could use a few more conventional weapons that won't reduce Offut AFB to a large hemispherical crater the moment base power flickers the briefest amount for any reason, to say nothing of someone bumping a storage container or warhead slightly.

Antimatter weapons just aren't going to happen. There is absolutely no reason for them that would justify either the risks or the expense.

[Pab Sungenis]

17. And yet there were a lot of people who said the same thing about atomic weapons.

Give the military time, and they will find a way.

[Posteritatis]

18. No, there weren't.

Nuclear weapons are precisely-engineered enough creatures that they can't spontaneously detonate. They don't require outside power sources at all times just to exist. If you drop one, either nothing will happen or you'll create an expensive and somewhat poisonous wreck, not a multikiloton mushroom cloud. The warhead material is not the sort of thing that's highly expensive to create in monatomic amounts; you don't need a CERN to throw around the energy required to create, never mind store, plutonium. Nuclear warheads can be dismantled and made safe in any number of ways, their fissile parts stored on conditions that don't require a high-energy power source operating with absolute complete perfection forever and ever.

These are all false with antimatter.

There is no comparison whatsoever beyond the fact that they both explode in certain circumstances. The difference is that nuclear warheads explode in one specific one, while antimatter warheads would in any other situation. This isn't a case of "nuclear weapons make a big boom, antimatter weapons would make a bigger one, and that's that." They are fundamentally different substances and not in the least comparable except to contrast them.

It's not going to happen, no matter how much breathless news stories or individuals citing Star Trek claim.

[tomm2thumbs]

16. exciting - must be like a child catching fireflies in a jar to these researchers

wish them all the best - uncovering new and amazing things seems so few and far between nowadays!

[happygoluckytoyou]

22. there is no replacement for a good Beryllium Sphere

[HopeHoops]

23. Well, unless you fracture yours - then you NEED a replacement. Don't let the miners kill Guy.

[Blue_Tires]

24. interesting...

[snooper2]

25. They better be safe with that...

We have been scanning the skies for decades and no sign of the pearly gates...


Antimatter may be the last place Jesus, Mohammad and Aphrodite are hiding. They may capture enough antimatter where one day Loki will pop out and say, "What's up you beeyatches?". "I was just trying to get some!"


:rofl:

[Joanne98]

26. Scientists capture antimatter atoms in particle breakthrough

Source: CNN

(CNN) -- Scientists have captured antimatter atoms for the first time, a breakthrough that could eventually help us to understand the nature and origins of the universe.

Researchers at CERN, the Geneva-based particle physics laboratory, have managed to confine single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap.

This will allow them to conduct a more detailed study of antihydrogen, which will in turn allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter.

Understanding antimatter is one of the biggest challenges facing science -- most theoretical physicists and cosmologists believe that at the Big Bang, when the universe was created, matter and antimatter were produced in equal amounts.



Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/11/18/switzerland.cern.antimatter/

[Joanne98]

27. Has CERN made the VATICAN ANTIMATTER BOMB for real?*

So - Dan Brown's turgid blockbuster Angels and Demons, in which a nefarious papal official nicks a vial of antimatter from CERN as part of a complicated scheme to become Pope by menacing the Vatican with explosive destruction. Twaddle? Or actually a perfectly feasible plan ripped from today's headlines, style of thing?

We merely bring the matter up as it turns out that in fact there really is a team of scientists at CERN - the Organisation (formerly Conseil) Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire - striving to contain unprecedented amounts of antimatter: and they have just announced a major success in this extremely difficult undertaking. Could it be that Dan Brown has actually got one right? Would a tiny, pocketable amount of antimatter really be sufficient to rip the guts out of Rome in a blast equivalent to that of a small nuke?

On the face of it, yes. Antimatter reacts with normal matter to convert the entire mass of both into energy; it is the most powerful type of explosive possible, easily capable of making a global thermonuclear war look like angry cockroaches lighting their farts at each other.

Just a third of one measly gram of antimatter reacting with matter (for instance with the walls of its containment vessel) would cause a 15-kilotonne blast equivalent to that of the atom bomb which destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 - surely enough to wipe out the Vatican and quite a lot of Rome too.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/18/cern_antimatter_bomb/