# Storage record for anti-hydrogen - broken - by a factor of 6000



## twilyth (Jun 14, 2011)

At CERN, scientists have contained an atom of anti-hydrogen for 1000 seconds.  Preserving anti-matter is important, not for warp technology but to see if anti-matter does in fact behave the same as normal matter - as predicted by quantum mechanics and general relativity.

I don't have a cite for this but I'll add it later if I can find it.  There is also speculation that anti-matter may emit anti-gravity and that this may be in fact be the unknown repulsive force currently labeled "dark energy".






*Scientists have trapped atoms of antimatter for 1,000 seconds, the longest time ever. An illustration shows the antihydrogen atom's path inside the trap and the escape of pions when the atom is annihilated by hitting the trap's walls. ALPHA/CERN*



> Better antimatter bottle
> 
> A team of scientists in Europe has trapped and held atoms of antihydrogen, hydrogen’s antimatter twin, for 1,000 seconds, almost 6,000 times longer than in previous experiments. With their improved antimatter bottle, reported online June 5 in Nature Physics, scientists at the European particle physics laboratory CERN near Geneva may soon be able to test several theories about antimatter. General relativity, for instance, predicts that gravity should have the same effect on antimatter as on matter. The standard model of particle physics suggests that the light given off by antihydrogen should be the same as that given off by hydrogen. —Devin Powell


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## MRCL (Jun 14, 2011)

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR05.11E.html


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## Fourstaff (Jun 14, 2011)

Patiently waiting for an antimatter bomb.


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## W1zzard (Jun 14, 2011)

even in a perfect world you can only create antimatter via e=mc².

so:

1 megaton of tnt = 1,162,222,222 kWh x 0.3 USD/kWH = 348 million $ to make the explosives for a 1 MT antimatter warhead, roughly 25 grams.

in reality world production of antimatter is pico grams at costs of millions of dollars, and you can't store it. also it's pretty much the worst material to work with because it will go boom when it touches anything

wait .. doesnt antimatter "explosion" create neutrinos which don't interact so they need to be subtracted from the yield?


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## gumpty (Jun 14, 2011)

This ^^^ caused this vvv


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## de.das.dude (Jun 14, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> even in a perfect world you can only create antimatter via e=mc².
> 
> so:
> 
> ...



it would be cheaper to build a cheap ass collider/ that sort and have it blow up.


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## Benetanegia (Jun 14, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> in reality world production of antimatter is pico grams at costs of millions of dollars, and you can't store it. also it's pretty much the worst material to work with because it will go boom when it touches anything





> How much does it cost to produce antimatter?
> If we count on the production CERN has done over the last 10 years (about 1 billionth of a gram), it has cost a few hundred millions Swiss francs.



http://livefromcern.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/FAQ1.html

That's probably the most accurate cost we can obtain.

But that's almost completely irrelevant tbh. Economic of scale applies greatly here. There's absolutely no way to predict what the cost would be in a global economy situation. Remember that the cost of the Manhattan Project was around $2 billion at that time! I don't even want to calculate how much that would be today, but it's a lot.

Considering that matter anti-matter reactions produce something like 3 orders of magnitude more power than nuclear reactions, that's something to take into account too.

The biggest problem to an antimatter power source is without a doubt storage.

But all things considered, this experiment at CERN is aimed at answering all those questions. I think it's too early to make any assumptions. If you'd have said 5 years ago that they would be able to contain antimatter for 1000 seconds they would have called you crazy and here we are, isn't it?



> wait .. doesnt antimatter "explosion" create neutrinos which don't interact so they need to be subtracted from the yield?



That's true and it's estimated that around 50% to 75%++ to almost 90% (depending on what paper you read) of energy is lost to neutrinos, but that's still 3 orders of magnitude greater mass-to-energy conversion than nuclear energy and about 10 orders of magnitude greater than chemical based energy. It has great potential if we find a way to safely store antimatter..


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## slyfox2151 (Jun 14, 2011)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WN-zk_giKw


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## W1zzard (Jun 14, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> the cost of the Manhattan Project was around $2 billion at that time! I don't even want to calculate how much that would be today, but it's a lot.








it's much less than i expected. compare that to the cost of recent US wars:






wouldnt it be smarter to have a manhattan project for things like energy efficiency, cancer cure, space elevator, alternative energy, genome and last but not least my favourite: mind-machine barrier to upload porn directly to the brain


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## cadaveca (Jun 14, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> and last but not least my favourite: *mind-machine barrier to upload porn directly to the brain*







At least you got the priorities straight.


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## W1zzard (Jun 14, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> no way to predict what the cost would be in a global economy situation



my math above assumes the theoretically most efficient production which would be e=mc²

taking into account 80% loss of usable energy due to neutrinos we come to 3 billion to make a 1 MT warhead.

even at optimistic estimates for fusion power, which could be around $0.03 per kWh we would be back at the initial $300M figure.

if solar photovoltaics follows a moore's law curve (which it does so far), we could see similar single digit cost around 2030 for PV


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## Benetanegia (Jun 14, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> my math above assumes the theoretically most efficient production which would be e=mc²
> 
> taking into account 80% loss of usable energy due to neutrinos we come to 3 billion to make a 1 MT warhead.
> 
> even at optimistic estimates for fusion power, which could be around $0.03 per kWh we would be back at the initial $300M figure.



You are assuming that antimatter has to be created**, in the same manner as they do now. Well not really, you are also suggesting a much better, perfect energy to mass conversion. But who says that anti-matter has to be created at all? Why not let nature make it for us? It would be a matter of knowing where to find and when really*.

As I see it this is the exact purpose of the experiments on CERN, to learn about antimatter and it's properties, which should be essentially the same as matter. So IF (and maybe that's a big if) antimatter has same properties as matter, which is what quantum mechanics predict, finding antimatter should be as easy as finding matter, which is "everywhere". It is obvious this is not the case, given the supremacy of matter on our universe, but finding the answer as to why this unbalance of matter/antimatter happens exactly, could lead to us being able to effectively find large ammounts of antimatter or create/reverse the conditions to produce it (or let nature just produce it) effectively. And remember we are talking about a very efficient energy source. 25 gr of antimatter would suffice to match the power of any nuclear bomb, so we don't need to create tons of material, just some kg at most.

*Where meaning on a subatomic scale and when meaning certain picoseconds (after some conditions are met).
** BTW now that I thought of it better, of course an antimatter energy source is imposible (not practical) with current technology. They create matter and antimatter pairs from energy, so converting the matter antimatter pair into energy again could only yield the exact same energy that was used to create the pair. Except that 50-80% of it would be wasted generating neutrinos. I guess this is why you especifically brought up e=mc² into the discussion.


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## PopcornMachine (Jun 14, 2011)

_Oh, what does it anti-matter?_


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## W1zzard (Jun 14, 2011)

you can't mine antimatter on earth for obvious reasons.

what you suggest seems to be taking virtual particle pairs and harvesting the antimatter particle? that's only possible if you pay back the borrowed energy to the universe -> e=mc² again

jovion corporation seems to have some ideas on harvesting zero point energy: 
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Jovion_Corporation_and_Zero_Point_Energy

ultimately they use a PV device to convert light to power, so just scrap their device and aim the solar cell at the sun for instant $


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## Benetanegia (Jun 15, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> you can't mine antimatter on earth for obvious reasons.
> 
> what you suggest seems to be taking virtual particle pairs and harvesting the antimatter particle? that's only possible if you pay back the borrowed energy to the universe -> e=mc² again



No, why would you need to pay back the energy? Not at all. Since matter and anti matter have the opposite charge you would just need to apply an electromagnetic field to separate one of each other. After all this is what they do on CERN after creating the antimatter.

I was not talking about that anyway, not exactly. I was in fact talking about hunting for antimatter, and that could only be done in "vacuum" for obvious reasons, BUT -here's the key- looking for or generating conditions that would either reverse the CP violation process for which matter is so much more common than antimatter or at least by nullifing such CP violation, making it posible in both situations to have a much larger ammount of antimatter available.

In theory, after the big bang the same ammount of matter and antimatter was created or should have been created, but currently matter dominates because of the so called violation of C and P symetries, which has resulted in much larger proportion of matter than antimatter. However between virtual particles, there's no real sign of this asymetry which at least from what I undertood, suggests that that the process of creation of matter and antimatter is exactly the same. It's just that matter tends to "survive" more, while decay on antimatter is much faster and stronger. But this has to occur because of something! Find the answer and maybe we could reverse the situation in laboratories.



> jovion corporation seems to have some ideas on harvesting zero point energy:
> http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Jovion_Corporation_and_Zero_Point_Energy
> 
> ultimately they use a PV device to convert light to power, so just scrap their device and aim the solar cell at the sun for instant $



I never really believed any claim of zero point energy being used as an energy source (so sorry if I didn't pay too much attention to the link*). I see it mostly as fantasy. Sure 0 ammount of energy is seemingly imposible from our undertanding of the universe according to quantum physics, so if you extract that little background energy, the "universe" would replace it. But always and with no limits (locally)? That's stupid IMO. I think that zero point energy is just a dream generated by extrapolating a mathematical interpretation and pretending to apply it to reality. The zero point energy is created by virtual particles being created and annihilated in the vacuum, extracting that energy would just make the ammount of interaction between subatomic particles smaller on that region (less ammount of virtual particles being created and annihilated) and would just reduce the zero point energy every time, until it would be 0 or very close to it. That's if it could be used at all.

That's like pretending that you could have infinite ammounts of air, because every time you extract air from a room with an opened window new air would come in. Of course it would, and so would zero point energy, but not at a rate which would be usable.

Zero point energy == long lasting energy source? Sure.**
zero point energy == huge ammounts of "free" energy? Noooo.

* I just stopped when I reached the "How it works" section and saw the picture of what looks soooo similar to a perpetual motion machine...
**Suitable for nanotechnology? Hmmm now that would be interesting to see.


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## twilyth (Jun 15, 2011)

Are you sure that the particle pairs are derived from energy in THIS universe?  Because I'm pretty sure that's not what happens.  The splitting of virtual particle pairs is the basis of Hawking radiation and how he comes to the conclusion that over a sufficiently long time scale, all black holes would evaporate.

It think it's also unlikely since as the universe expands, there is no indication that the zero point energy has become weaker, just the opposite.  Although that does assume that the dark energy causing this and zero point energy are the same - which I think would basically be speculation on my part at the present time.

Anyway, the standard model is always evolving.  For example, the people at Fermilab think they might have evidence of a new fundamental particle - http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/72095/title/Remodeling_the_standard_model


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## silkstone (Jun 15, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> even in a perfect world you can only create antimatter via e=mc².
> 
> so:
> 
> ...



25g of antimatter would yield 2250000000000000000J of energy (2.25x10^18)
a 1 MT nuclear bomb is 4.184×10^15 J so you are actually looking at the 25 G of antimatter being 1000x stronger. So you'd actually be looking at around 0.03g of antimatter for the same amount of energy, right?

I also believe the mass of neutrinos are about 1000x less than electrons, not zero but pretty negligible.


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## twilyth (Jun 15, 2011)

silkstone said:


> 25g of antimatter would yield 2250000000000000000J of energy (2.25x10^18)
> a 1 MT nuclear bomb is 4.184×10^15 J so you are actually looking at the 25 G of antimatter being 1000x stronger. So you'd actually be looking at around 0.03g of antimatter for the same amount of energy, right?
> 
> I also believe the mass of neutrinos are about 1000x less than electrons, not zero but pretty negligible.



Yeah, that been pretty well accepted for a while.  Once they confirmed their observations that neutrinos oscillate between 3 different flavors, apparently the standard model requires that they have at least SOME mass.

Here's an interesting article that the neutrino mass issue to CPT violation.





_One of the two detectors in the MINOS neutrino experiment sits
in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota.
A recent analysis of MINOS data hints that neutrinos and
antineutrinos might not weigh the same, suggesting
either the presence of an unknown force or a violation of
Einstein’s theory of special relativity._



> Current theories of particle physics are based on two assumptions, notes Mohapatra. All known forces arise from interactions with neighboring particles and they all obey Einstein’s special relativity theory, which holds that the speed of light and the laws of physics are always the same regardless of a particle’s speed or rotation. For that to hold true, particles and antiparticles—-including neutrinos and their antipartners — must have the same mass, he says.
> 
> But new measurements from an experiment called MINOS (for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) seem to contradict that notion. The three known types of neutrinos —electron, muon and tau — act like chameleons, transforming from one type into another as they travel.
> 
> ...


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## W1zzard (Jun 15, 2011)

silkstone said:


> 25g of antimatter would yield 2250000000000000000J of energy (2.25x10^18)
> a 1 MT nuclear bomb is 4.184×10^15 J so you are actually looking at the 25 G of antimatter being 1000x stronger. So you'd actually be looking at around 0.03g of antimatter for the same amount of energy, right?
> 
> I also believe the mass of neutrinos are about 1000x less than electrons, not zero but pretty negligible.



your math looks wrong:

0.025 kg * c² * 2 = 4.49 * 10^15 J is what i get ?

neutrinos: if 90% of the energy goes into neutrinos, it's 90% energy, no matter their mass


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## W1zzard (Jun 15, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> Since matter and anti matter have the opposite charge you would just need to apply an electromagnetic field to separate one of each other



which is where you put in energy



Benetanegia said:


> hunting for antimatter



even the interstellar medium is not empty, if there was antimatter there it would collide at some point, so it would create radiation that we would see on earth, lots of it


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## Benetanegia (Jun 15, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> which is where you put in energy



Yes, but the ammount of energy required to move them is nowhere near the one required to create them.



W1zzard said:


> even the interstellar medium is not empty, if there was antimatter there it would collide at some point, so it would create radiation that we would see on earth, lots of it



I never said anything was empty. In fact I've been suggesting quite the opposite. Anyway. Considering the far greater ammount of matter than anitimatter, there would be no radiation, any antimatter existing out there in the vacuum will probabilistically only collide with matter, instantly annihilating both and resulting in no radiation*. 

And there is radiation. We atribute it all to the Big Bang, but I don't think that's something we can measure with any precision if all comes from a past big explosion or if something is being contributed "locally".

Anyway and just to clarify. I'm not talking about finding antimatter as in finding stars made of antimatter, that would certainly leave radiation we would be able to find**. I'm talking about finding antiparticles and "slowly" (in quantum mechanics nothing is slowly by our standards) collecting them.

*Except maybe, if the info posted by twylith is correct and neutrinos and antineutrinos have different mass, then it could generate some radiation type that we just can't measure. If neutrinos are not identical, other particles are most probably deemed to be different too, having at least the same extra component the neutrino has. That could also explain the unbalance between matter and antimatter, even so from a classical pooint of view. If after a matter antimatter collision something is left behind that belongs to matter, it would potentially make matter easier to assemble again than antimatter. Right?

** How much of our sky has been estudied thourughly anyway? And antimatter masses the size of planets is definately a posibility, just by looking at radiation, although probabilistically the chances are obviously absurdingly small.


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## silkstone (Jun 15, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> your math looks wrong:
> 
> 0.025 kg * c² * 2 = 4.49 * 10^15 J is what i get ?
> 
> neutrinos: if 90% of the energy goes into neutrinos, it's 90% energy, no matter their mass



you are right, i am out by a factor of 1000. i wasn't calculating mass in kg, but in grams for some strange reason??

how can 90% of the enrgy go into neutrinos? i couldn't imagine the matter-antimatter reaction creating trillions of neutrinos. + if the energy does all go into netrions, we just need to learn to harvest this "neutrino energy" like we can with photons. and from e=mc^2 if 90% of energy we transferred to neutrinos, that would be a hulluva lot of neutrinos for a single proton - anti-proton collision considering how they are nearly massless.




W1zzard said:


> even the interstellar medium is not empty, if there was antimatter there it would collide at some point, so it would create radiation that we would see on earth, lots of it



Much of space is empty, true, space is not a perfect vacuum, but the small amount of matter that exists in a vacumm, if it were to collide with antimatter, would hardly create enough radiation to measure. Just because there is lack of evidence for something does not mean it does not exist. Furthermore, who is to say that large scale collisions have not occured in the past and will not occur in the future, all we can say with any certianty is that they haven;t happened in the region of space we have been looking at in the period of time we have been looking.


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## W1zzard (Jun 15, 2011)

you get lots of pions which decay into neutrinos one way or another


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## silkstone (Jun 15, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> you get lots of pions which decay into neutrinos one way or another



and with each decay, i imagine energy would be released. Even if it isn't a direct mass>energy conversion, i imagine it would be possible to "harness" that energy. Classically all energy is is particle motion. So if you have lots of particles moving very quickly, you have lots of energy.


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## W1zzard (Jun 15, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> Yes, but the ammount of energy required to move them is nowhere near the one required to create them.



isn't the only known way to separate virtual pairs by hawking radiation at a black hole event horizon?

amount is written with one m btw


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## twilyth (Jun 15, 2011)

Considering the fact that only 3-4% of the universe is normal matter and the rest is some combination of dark matter and dark energy, I don't think we actually know whether or not there is an anti-matter deficit.  If for example, dark matter is composed of a new fundamental particle which happens to be the anti-particle of whatever the type is then anti matter might be the dominant form.

So let's say that there is an as yet undiscovered weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) that makes up dark matter.  Let's call this class of particles, the Pixie.  Like any other particle, it will have a matter and anti-matter form.  Now let's say that dark matter is made up exclusively of anti-matter Pixies.

Well, that's entirely plausible since these are WIMPs after all.  So even though they're anti-matter, since they barely interact with normal matter, if at all, they would never run into and annihilate with ordinary matter.  We could be surrounded by it right now.  It could be passing through our bodies thousands of times per second and it wouldn't matter since it would never interact.


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## Benetanegia (Jun 15, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> isn't the only known way to separate virtual pairs by hawking radiation at a black hole event horizon?
> 
> amount is written with one m btw



No there's more ways.

But you are essentially right. A large ammount of energy is required to separate them in nature or by us.

But like I said, we just can't  simply look at how can we do it now or how nature is able to do it. Not in a thread about scientists trying to know more about it. That's the whole purpose and I can only be positive about it, given the track record of science.

We were not able to split the atom, and was only deemed posible in the conditions present in stars. And we do it now. We are also able to manipulate them in a way in which we substract the particle we want and create alpha, beta and gamma radiations to our advantage. I think that we will be able to do the same with every subatomic particle. And look at twilyth's info about neutrinos. That may just be the answer. Maybe there's a sub-subatomic particle which is the difference between matter and antimatter. I see no reason to believe we could not (ever) interact and manipulate that particle in a similar way as we manipulate electrons and photons in order to change atoms. In the same way that we use seemingly small energy levels to produce much higher energy output, I see no reasons to believe the same cannot be made in a sub-subatomic level. Once we learn the difference between matter and antimatter, creating antimatter from existing matter could be as easy as changing the charge of an atom.


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## W1zzard (Jun 15, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> No there's more ways.



like?


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## Benetanegia (Jun 15, 2011)

W1zzard said:


> like?



From wiki:


> In order to conserve the total fermion number of the universe, a fermion cannot be created without also creating its antiparticle; thus many physical processes lead to pair creation. The need for the normal ordering of particle fields in the vacuum can be interpreted by the idea that a pair of virtual particles may briefly "pop into existence", and then annihilate each other a short while later.
> 
> Thus, virtual particles are often popularly described as coming in pairs, a particle and antiparticle, which can be of any kind. These pairs exist for an extremely short time, and mutually annihilate in short order. In some cases, however, it is possible to boost the pair apart using external energy so that they avoid annihilation and become real particles.
> 
> ...


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## wahdangun (Jun 15, 2011)

Benetanegia said:


> You are assuming that antimatter has to be created**, in the same manner as they do now. Well not really, you are also suggesting a much better, perfect energy to mass conversion. But who says that anti-matter has to be created at all? Why not let nature make it for us? It would be a matter of knowing where to find and when really*.
> 
> As I see it this is the exact purpose of the experiments on CERN, to learn about antimatter and it's properties, which should be essentially the same as matter. So IF (and maybe that's a big if) antimatter has same properties as matter, which is what quantum mechanics predict, finding antimatter should be as easy as finding matter, which is "everywhere". It is obvious this is not the case, given the supremacy of matter on our universe, but finding the answer as to why this unbalance of matter/antimatter happens exactly, could lead to us being able to effectively find large ammounts of antimatter or create/reverse the conditions to produce it (or let nature just produce it) effectively. And remember we are talking about a very efficient energy source. 25 gr of antimatter would suffice to match the power of any nuclear bomb, so we don't need to create tons of material, just some kg at most.
> 
> ...



I think antimatter engine is not used to generate energy but used for propulsion system, so we will have a very efficient rocket so we can carry more stuff while using less fuel, so maybe interplanetary travel will be quite "affordable"  and we eventually can colonize mars or europa moon


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