9 ms·
If you can ship antimatter, you can drop it on people. Luckily, we are still orders of magnitude away from a bomb-sized amount.
by queuebert 1y ago
If you can ship antimatter, you can drop it on people. Luckily, we are still orders of magnitude away from a bomb-sized amount.
- sargun 1y agoWhat's the biggest barrier to creating a lot of antimatter?
- kadoban 1y agoNothing 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.
- throwup238 1y agoEnergy. 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.
- mlindner 1y agoHas there been research on more efficient ways to generate antiprotons? (By the way anti-hydrogen isn't how you would store it as anti-hydrogen can't be trapped.)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fsh 1y agoAnti-hydrogen is routinely trapped in magnetic traps at CERN.
- kadoban 1y agoIf anyone is curious how, I think this is vaguely the idea: https://alpha.web.cern.ch/science/2-trapping-antihydrogen https://alpha.web.cern.ch/science/2-trapping-antihydrogen tl;dr: strong magnetic fields in a certain configuration since in a strong enough field anti-hydrogen acts like little bar magnets.
- bawolff 1y agoMaking 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.
- pfdietz 1y agoAlso, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma (see discussion of the "Brillouin Limit")
- queuebert 1y agoMake an antimatter liquid with strong intra-molecular bonds (e.g. anti-H2O) that is only slightly ionized. That would be easier to contain magnetically.
- pfdietz 1y agoHow do you propose to do that? Getting any antielement beyond antihydrogen would require doing nuclear fusion on antiprotons.
- queuebert 1y agoWhich is hard but theoretically possible.
- pfdietz 1y agoFusion 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.