(Viewed 1,728 times)

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

What is antimatter and why does it matter?

The place is England. The year is 1928. One of the founding theorists of quantum mechanics, Paul Dirac, is scratching his head because solutions to his equations have yielded unexpected results. For the solutions to make sense, he reasons, there must be a particle that has the mass of an electron but the opposite charge. At the time, such a thing was not known to exist.

Unlike matter, antimatter is not common. Unless you're in the upper atmosphere, or inside a particle accelerator, you're not going to stumble across it. "Antimatter was not always so rare," Stéphane Coutu, Penn State particle physicist says. There was a time when it was as prevalent as matter itself. "Right after the Big Bang," Coutu explains, "we believe there must have been exactly the same amounts of matter and antimatter…and yet owing to some small asymmetry in the laws of particle interactions, all of the antimatter and most of the matter in the early universe was annihilated. We are left today with the resulting matter-dominated universe." So the study of matter-antimatter interactions is a glimpse at the first few moments of a nascent universe.

Full story here: www.physorg.com/news6709.html
======

I wonder what Scotty would do?

[Maddad]

Science fiction is rife with tales of high-energy particle annihilation, and indeed, antimatter weapons have appeared in current bestselling novels. This is unrealistic, Coutu says. "[It] would be very impractical owing to very great difficulties in producing and maintaining significant amounts of antimatter."

It is unrealistic with current technology. The history of technology though has been a story of constant improvements at an ever accelerating pace. We may find new ways of producing and containing antimatter that reduce the amount of equipment needed.

One idea that I've been toying with is the production of ordinary matter from the energy field of the universe that is everywhere. Particles are constantly being created which then vanish as they find their oppositely charged counterpart. When they disappear almost immediately, we call them virtual. If they hang around a while, we call them real. If we can control where they appear and where they are going when they appear, future technology might be able to create matter apparently from nothing.

Scale this up to the macro level and you could produce first atomic hydrogen on demand. Cause the particles to appear in pairs and you could make molecular hydrogen. Increase your definitions and eight protons and eight neutrons could appear to gether; an oxygen atom. You don't have to worry about providing electrons because they would arrive from the environment of the equipment. Keep improving your definition and you could cause ten protons and ten neutrons to appear together as a water molecule. Scale that up to the macro level and you have a device that would make liquid water that had never existed anywhere in the universe before.

I was bugged by one problem though. The twenty particles would produce twenty anti-particles as a byproduct. How would you dispose of them? I shrugged and thought that defining their appearance as inside the sun would take care of the problem. Since the sun's in hydrostatic balance, this antimatter wouldn't increase the energy output at all. Even if it did, it would take a million years for any increase to make it's way to the surface to make its effects felt on Earth. This would hold true at least until you got close to the sun's current energy output resulting from the anihilation of four million tons of matter a second. If we kept Earth's entire production of water under a million tons a second, we wouldn't have to worry about it. That rate though is huge. We could supply absolutely chemically pure water to a lot of communities around the world long before we reached that point.

However, since we're trying to deal with a problem of too much anti-matter, diverting a small quantity into research gives us a ready source of the interesting stuff.

[John]

Very creative and interesting thoughts. How do you think we would control and harness this created matter?

Doesn't this theoretically occur only in interstellar or intergalactic space? How would we make the trip out to get (much less controll the directions of) these virtual particles.

Never mind my skepticism, though. If you find a way, to harness that resource (sounds like a replicator on a starship), I'll have an H2O toast with you.

John

[Maddad]

Thanks John. Controlling and harnessing the matter isn't the matter. I'd like to see it serving as the headwaters for new rivers running through deserts. As for antimatter, I'd control that by not dealing with it.

Supposedly it occurs everywhere, including deep space, but also in your refrigerator.