Breakthrough in antimatter production

https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/breakthrough-antimatter-production

by doener • 8 months ago

47 48 8 months ago

pfdietz• 8 months ago

It increases the rate of production of neutral antihydrogen from antiprotons and positrons by a factor of 8. It doesn't increase the efficiency of production of antiprotons, which is the extremely inefficient, energy intensive part.

throwawayqqq11• 8 months ago

The output got increased by a factor of 8, did the energy consuption increase proportionately? If not, its an efficiency gain.

tsimionescu2• 8 months ago

If you have a process where it takes 5MW to produce one component and 80KW to convert that component into the final product, and you increase the efficiency of the second step 8 times so it only takes 10KW, that's real and awesome, but still almost irrelevant to the overall efficiency of the process. I have no idea what the actual numbers are, just stating the general concept.

SiempreViernes2• 8 months ago

They cut production time to a given number of anti-atoms from 10 weeks to 7 hours by improving the electron cooling, just from this fact it is a bit rich to insist the anti-proton generation is the limiting factor.

Going to the paper itself we can observe that the CERN Antiproton Decelerator can deliver 10^7 antiprotons every 2 minutes. Remembering it previously took 10 weeks to capture 10^4 anti-atoms, I hope you forgive me for not agreeing that the antiproton generation is the source of important inefficiencies.

emmavis2• 8 months ago

In simple terms for humanists, does that brings us closer in anyway to scifi engines?:)

Ygg2• 8 months ago

No. Unless you find a chunk of antimatter or a way to break the laws of physics.

lolive• 8 months ago

Isn't it the path to a yet deadlier bomb ? #alwaysLookOnTheBrightSideOfLife

GCUMstlyHarmls• 8 months ago

Just be-fore you draw your terminal breath ♫

lazide• 8 months ago

In all (realistic) interplanetary space travel - not to mention interstellar - the difference between the largest bomb/death ray anyone has ever experienced and a better drive, is purely a matter of where you aim it and when/how you throttle it up.

The most hilarious part of the expanse for instance is how they didn’t really use their actual drives as weapons even in CQB, which is quite a waste!

Not actually that different for rockets now, frankly, we just usually don’t operate direct nuclear fission/fusion drives right now for this very reason and our own sense of self preservation.

There certainly are plans on the drawing board!

It would take 23 grams of antimatter to produce the effect of a 1 megaton nuclear bomb, and the biggest factor stopping someone is both production of the matter itself (improving) and actual shielding technology (magnetic bottles good enough to effectively trap that much antimatter are huge and extremely energy consuming right now - much bigger than a fusion bomb of equivalent power).

Theoretically, it should be possible to store that much in a thermos bottle, however. We just need better superconductor technology.

adrianN• 8 months ago

The most realistic sci-fi engines are nuclear pulse engines where you ride the shockwaves of thousands of fusion bombs to reach a few percent of the speed of light. Those we could probably build right now if we were willing to spend the money. Replacing the fusion bombs with antimatter bombs would be a nice improvement for the basic design

mr_mitm• 8 months ago

Is there a way to slow down using fusion bombs? Even if you manage to bring thousands of fusion bombs with you? Sounds like this is only a sensible approach for sending probes, which will then zip by their target at huge speeds.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt• 8 months ago

How do you do that and not die?

emmavis2• 8 months ago

Thanks for explanation!

gpderetta2• 8 months ago

I think the more "practical" idea is to replace the fission stage of a fusion bomb with antimatter annihilation.

NooneAtAll3• 8 months ago

it brings us 1 order of magnitude closer

10 more to go!

aeve890• 8 months ago

What are the civilian applications?

secult2• 8 months ago

PET scan (You have to wait for civic applications of the newly discovered technologies for a while, but the "technology transfer" from CERN to practical applications has a few notable examples.)

joelthelion2• 8 months ago

PET doesn't use antimatter, at least it doesn't use it directly. It uses regular radioactive tracers.

contravariant2• 8 months ago

None for the foreseeable future I hope.

fragmede2• 8 months ago

Why is that? I must have missed the episode of black mirror you watched that would make that a bad thing.

SiempreViernes2• 8 months ago

Performing precision tests of fundamental physics by verifying that antimatter behaves as predicted by standard theory.

gostsamo• 8 months ago

if produced in BIG enough quantities, very small reactors. As far as AM cannot be mined, but only produced at high price, currently it would matter only for deep space and bombs where we have RTG-s for deep space.

gradschool• 8 months ago

That cloud of laser-cooled beryllium ions would probably be great for overclocking.

ReptileMan• 8 months ago

Slow annihilating weapons that boil water that goes trough turbines.

nubinetwork• 8 months ago

And what do we do with it? This isn't star trek, I can't just go shove this into my warp drive and blast off... /shrug

alansaber• 8 months ago

These intermediate steps are important to the development of new technologies

thot_experiment• 8 months ago

Now we can make a firecracker's worth of antimatter (by annihilation energy) in a mere two hundred thousand years of continuous production. Super cool stuff though, pun intended.

bogdanos• 8 months ago

I just finished Angels and Demons ffs

hakkikonu• 8 months ago

Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65085-4

Breakthrough in antimatter production

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