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What's the biggest barrier to creating a lot of antimatter?
by sargun 1y ago
What'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.