Michael V said:
Cymek said:
SCIENCE said:the fun thing is that they can gush all they like about the civilian benefits of dual use technology
Cern researchers are testing traps capable of moving antimatter, which explodes into energy as soon as it comes into contact with regular matter
The device on Cern’s truck will carry about 1,000 antimatter particles, weighing about a billionth of a trillionth of a gram. Should the containment fail, and the antimatter make contact with normal matter, the resulting pulse of energy would be so feeble, the load doesn’t even warrant a radioactive label.
Other laboratories could measure the antimatter with 100 times more precision, researchers say. With a view to conducting such experiments, Smorra and his colleague, Stefan Ulmer, are building a device to receive antiprotons at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. To survive the trip from Cern, the antimatter would need to be contained for more than 10 hours: two for loading and unloading the trap and the rest for the 500-mile drive. The trap itself is a feat of engineering. It must hold antimatter in such a way that it never comes into contact with normal matter. To do this, the chamber is held under ultra-high vacuum, comparable to the emptiness of interstellar space. It is cooled to -269C, causing any stray gas to freeze on the chamber walls. Strong magnetic and electric fields are then used to hold the antiprotons in the centre of the cryogenic chamber. The fields are strong enough to hold the antimatter in place should the truck hit bumps or brake sharply in transit. Perhaps the greatest threat to the material is getting stuck in traffic and the power supply failing. For the test run at Cern, the trap will be powered by batteries that last about four hours. Longer trips will need a dedicated generator on board.
“If we ever want to do experiments with antiprotons somewhere else, we need to get this on the road and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Smorra says. “First of all we have to show we can move the antimatter and this is the big milestone for us.”
but what if you ever want to let antimatter confinement fail somewhere else, after a long distance flight for example
It is antihydrogen they use ?
I’d assume the higher up the periodic chart they go the more effort to create the antimatter counterpart
Antiprotons. Mentioned three times above.
I suppose that an antiproton is an anti-Hydrogen ion, though.
Ok
I was thinking they were an anti matter atom but its just the proton