Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: Atomic-S on 21/01/2017 05:12:03
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Is there any way to confine antimatter on Earth for long-term use?
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Is there any way to confine antimatter on Earth for long-term use?
This happens at CERN. Trapped anti-hydrogen is to be used for test purposes. Including an analysis of the spectrum of anti-hydrogen and its interaction with the gravitational field.
https://home.cern/about/engineering/storing-antimatter
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It is fairly easy to store charged ions, like antiprotons and antielectrons (positrons). But you can't store very many of them because they repel each other.
Antihydrogen is harder to store, because it has no overall electric field. At present the limit is a few dozen antihydrogen atoms.
So we haven't accumulated enough antimatter to make the explosion in Dan Brown's novel "Angels and Demons".
And we certainly haven't accumulated nearly enough antimatter to power a spaceship, as portrayed in "Star Trek".
...but it does make a good plot line if you are about to lose antimatter containment - that would really upset your day. This is one line that they have used repeatedly.
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Is there any way to confine antimatter on Earth for long-term use?
I've myself have been pondering a way to store such matter. Suppose we had a baseball which was made from antimatter. That means that instead of electrons on the surface of the baseball there are positrons. Electron-Positron annihilation happens only at the surface of such an object and an antimatter baseball in a vacuum sitting on a table would have annihilation only at the small point where the sphere (baseball) touches the table. If that's not too much radiation and destruction of the sphere then it'd be easy to store antimatter. Otherwise it'd be very hard.
Bth - Evan is refering only a very small amount of antimatter. An amount so small that you'd be unable to feel if you were holding that much in your hand. But it's that antimatter used in beam interactions/science.
Evan
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It appears not quite true that ordinary matter annihilated when it meets antimatter, but only when it meets its specific corresponding antiparticle.
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Please let me know when you are going to do your experiment with a baseball sized lump of antimatter so that I can keep well away it puts me in mind of the tickling of the dragons tail experiments they did with samples of U235 or those performed at Chernobyl