Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: Ultima on 15/03/2005 13:04:25
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I was just wondering since we can now produce antihydrogen is there any chance some idiot will decide to try and make a hydrogen antihydrogen bomb? In the future would it be feasible to produce antihydrogen in an efficient enough way (and in amount great enough) so that it would be viable to create a hydrogen antihydrogen power plant?
Plus is there any other cool application for antimatter technology?
wOw the world spins?
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Anti-matter is a laboratory curiosity at this time. It can't be stored outside of a magnetically confined storage ring in an accelerator. It requires megajoules of energy to produce an atomic-sized quantity of anti-hydrogen. I don't see this having commercial uses.
Cool applications for anti-matter are academic at this time.
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Unless we find a antimatter mine somewhere (a rather scary thought) antimatter will never be a source of energy, as you will always have to put in more energy (at the moment millions of times more) to make it than you would get out.
This said you can't beat antimatter for energy to weight ratio. According to Einstein E=mc2 is the best it is possible to get, so where this is important, like interstellar travel (you have to carry all your fuel with you) and yes building really unpleasent bombs, it would come into it's own. This is however a long way into the future.
PS if you wanted to store antimatter it would be a lot easier to do so as anti-protons and positrons rather than anti-hydrogen, as you can move them around with electric and magnetic fields - antihydrogen would tend to just drift to the edge of your jar... with unpleasent results.
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Wonder how they do contain antihydrogen then???
wOw the world spins?
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Last time I heard about this, they had made about 6 anti-hydrogen atoms, which lasted for a few micro seconds before they crashed into the end of the apparatus. I think it is hard to make, because you have to persuade the anti-protons and positrons to be going at approximately teh same speed, and as you tend to make these things by smashing particles together, so they are going pretty quick to start with.
according to:
http://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/hbar/Pub-97-398-E.pdf
which is quite old, they make the anti-hydrogen in a anti-proton ring, and detect it by it's tendancy to fly out of the ring, and they then ionise it again to make sure that it consists of a positron and an anti-proton.
and
http://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/hbar/Pub-97-426-E.pdf
would indicate that the anti-hydrogen is still moving at relativistic speeds.
so essentialy they don't contain it!
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quote:
Originally posted by Ultima
Wonder how they do contain antihydrogen then???
wOw the world spins?
Dilithium crystals![:p]