Last week I had the chance to visit CERN's Antimatter Factory, and let me tell you I was feeling like a child on Christmas Day.
The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive. That they are considering sending it hundreds of km away is mind blowing.
Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
The interesting idea behind it is basically that for antimatter a potential wall, imagine a step function which is 0 for negative and 1 for positive and a wave that hits the wall from the negative to the positives, in theory it cannot propagate in the wall, turns out that one solution can propagate in that wall and that's antimatter: It basically sees the potential as inverted.
So since people were thinking about that they started considering that if it happens for EM interaction it could be the case for gravitation, that lead to wonder if the antimatter had different properties in that department.
From a pure theory point of view the mass of the particles and anti particles should be identical but they might have "fallen up" instead of falling down.
Note that if there are significant differences this would be extremely interesting but I am not deep enough into exotic theories that take into account those exotic cases to make more statements about the matter.
Which may have been true in a world where gravity was a charge or like the other forces. But it isn't. Everything with mass has mass. There is no detection of any sort of anti-mass, no matter the exotic possibilities such a thing would enable.
That's awesome. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting CERN too. Curious, what part of the visit stood out as especially impressive? Last I checked, there was a pretty long waiting list for tours.
If you want to visit Atlas (control room) or CERN’s first accelerator (a synchrocyclotron) just show up in the morning when the visitor center opens. The tour guides are often passionate scientists. The museum is worth visiting, you’ll get to see the first www server (Tim-Berner Lee’s nextcube). The live shows are well put together. And everything is pretty much free of charge.
The only thing I can think of that has a waiting period is if you want to visit the actual tunnels, you can only visit them in between experiments (every 10-20 years maybe even less often).
The presentations/videos talk extensively about CMS' detector (if I remember right). I'm not sure about visiting the control center, you would need to inquire if/when they do that.
That is great news. The last time I checked, there was a long waitlist and needed to book online (maybe COVID-related?). Appreciate you sharing this story.
I work for the control group at another accelerator, so we were visiting and meeting their control guys. Super friendly people all of them, they treated us like kings... and their control centre is bigger than our whole facility xD
He was referring that in many experiments (especially in medical/biological) you usually have a control group, e.g. the group that is being given a placebo.
I've seen this expressed before, but every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures?
To me things like tokamak fusion reactors or rockets or even places like the massive piles of pipe work outside of SpaceX's launch site feel way cooler.
When I look at that pile, I see hundreds or thousands of devices that need to be working in concert to produce a meaningful result. Devices that need to be triggered exactly when the particle bunch travels by at near speed of light. These devices then generate data that needs to be stored somewhere and in a way that is later useful to the scientists.
The complexity hiding within the pile is immense, and that is what makes it impressive to me.
I see about the same thing as you do, only I am basically also picturing Ghostbusters who also had some very specific tooling for trapping, containing, and transporting ghosts, which was all central to the plot of the original film.
I can just foresee a future asshole European mayor who swaggers into the CERN remote antimatter facility and shuts it all down, triggering Armageddon and a new rampage by the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Man, I've been in their underground part, every 5 years they open for public and open the detectors themselves. It was by huge margin by far the best executed engineering of any type I ever saw, and I don't consider myself a nerd in this area. Every tiny detail was simply perfect, not a speck of dust, all cables aligned perfectly etc. Seeing inner parts of these massive detector tubes (maybe 10x20m ?) was the pinnacle of the show.
Pictures simply don't do it justice. One can't replace physical travelling and experiencing things (and people) for whatever purpose and this shows it well.
That being said, since I live not far from there, I certainly hope that containment is flawless, don't want to experience matter-antimatter annihilation of non-trivial amounts anywhere near my kids, or myself for that matter (NIMBYism at its best, get your damn antimatter off my lawn!)
Because we are massive science nerds. I have been interested in this kind of stuff since I was a little kid. Which leads to the second point...
I ended up working at another accelerator facility, so even though I am an IT guy, I actually understand what I am looking at, which helps to increase the enjoyment.
A lot of tourism is just feeling a place. You can often get better views of a place in photographs than in real life. And yet the presence feels as if it adds something.
I remember being literally stopped in my tracks by the Rosetta Stone. (It was closing and they were shooing us out.) There's nothing there that I haven't seen far more clearly (and it's not as if I can read any of its three languages), and yet somehow it felt Important.
> every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it.
(Maybe I'm saying the obvious; sorry if that's the case ...) In perception, knowledge greatly affects what we 'see', on a physiological level - our brain's perceptual function is not at all purely sensory, but wired into the rest of our minds. People who have never drunk wine may say it's just unpleasant and a strong taste, and why drink it? People who know it well can perceive all sorts of things, from flavors to colors and more.
With knowledge, the wires, magnets, and electronics, like the sensations of wine, will reveal themselves. A good, passionate source can help ...
> just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics
You just described a tokamak fusion reactor. So at the end of the day you either know exactly what you're looking at and are in awe of the entire achievement, or have no idea what you're looking at and maybe are in awe of the massive pile of engineeringy looking bits and bobs.
Same effect visiting any massive chemical plant or oil refinery (because the processes usually require a lot of pipes, huge containers, and so on), that make you wonder "how on Earth do they even remember where everything is, let alone design and build it".
Not much different from art if you think about it. You can see a masterpiece painting, or some paint on a piece of cloth.
But for all of the above, when you know what those are, the impressive effect is amplified.
The emergency copper quench conductors the thickness of my arm were pretty cool to see.
You got to realize they've built a giant circular vacuum tube surrounded by superconducting magnetic jackets that can steer and accelerate a particle beam (actually two going opposite directions), and giant cameras/calorimeters that image photons and other decaying particles from the beam collisions on the micrometer spatial scale. Each component individually may not be grand of scale and complexity but when taken as a whole it works together in amazing ways.
The speed of light is a significant limitation at these kinds of scales.
It's not just a massive pile of wiring and magnets etc, it's a massive pile of wiring and magnets which kicks particles around a race track the size of a small town, with absolutely insane timing precision before dumping them into targets the size of buildings, all generating unimaginably huge volumes of data which have to recorded in nanoseconds.
One great way to enjoy the visit and get an idea of what you are looking at is to pick something very specific, like some connector or box, and ask what it does. Then ask what happens when it fails. The answer to the later question is almost invariably interesting - even in relatively mundane places like a power plant or fire truck.
You are getting downvoted but it made me wonder (I visited CERN a few years ago). I guess there are two aspects in play. One, the pile is massive, which naturally inspires awe, especially in person. Two, I know that what I'm looking at is actually a unique super advanced piece of technology, which took countless hours to produce, and that influences how one sees it.
They built a trap, loaded it with electrons as a test, and drove 5000 miles from Martinez, CA (where the magnet was built) to Cambridge, MA. They mention some unexpected trouble after crossing the Rockies - the steadily increasing atmospheric pressure during the descent reduced helium boiloff rate, which reduced helium exhaust flow, and allowed moist air to flow back through the exhaust pipe, resulting in ice buildup. They cleared the blockage, but in doing so, lost the electrons!
I believe that they never repeated the trip with antiprotons. But hopefully the CERN delivery crew have learned from the experience, and won't run into similar trouble coming down from the Alps.
It sounds like helium is still presenting a challenge:
> ...changes in the truck's speed produced turbulence in the liquid helium, making measurements of its presence unreliable. Levels had dropped from about 75 percent of maximum to 30 percent by the time the system was reconnected, suggesting that liquid helium presents the key limiting factor in shipping.
This was after just a 4km stint around CERN campus.
Not sure why, but I found it amusing when they said that the antimatter "reached speeds of over 40 km/hour." Not sure what the speeds are at the point of its creation (there are knowledgeable folks on here who will know, I'm sure), but that must seem sloooooow in comparison.
"We accelerated the antimatter to speeds of over 40 km/h!"
"Good lord, using what technology?"
"A DAF LF 180."
Although i have no idea what actual make or model they used - i was appalled to see that it was not stated in the materials and methods section of the paper. There's a photo in a news piece showing it's a small rigid-sided lorry:
The point was that the van driving around with the containment device reached 40mph and this establishes that the containment device can handle a bit of rattling around
They only had regular Protons in it for this test though. The point was to see if the Protons were still there after the 40 mph journey in a van
The anti proton was very fast, but it needs to capture a positron to become an antimatter hydrogen atom. This happens after the anti proton was slowed down.
Reading this makes me so happy! Even if it by itself might not be the biggest science news, we know about antimatter for a long time and we are still talking about a few atoms only, but the news that people are actually handling antimatter to the point of transporting it with a truck, just feels a bit like sci-fi actually happening.
one of the most interesting of antimatter experiments is that if they somehow showed antimatter only experience 60% gravity, that will be huge. (earlier result of measuring antimatter’s gravity showed they don’t posses antigravity, but they seems to experiences less gravity. I guess a dedicated follow up experiment will likely get better measurement on whether antimatter indeed experience less gravity.)
This is incorrect. The only measurement of antimatter gravity so far by ALPHA-g resulted in no difference to normal matter within the experimental uncertainty [1]. This is not surprising, since any difference would violate conservation of energy.
Antimater has positively charged electrons (positrons) and negatively charged protons (antiprotons). Its neutrons are antineutrons made of a positron and antiproton.
So just the charges are swapped around.
Charges interact with electric fields.
Gravity is related to mass. It doesn't matter whether the bulk of the mass comes from negatively or positively charged particles.
Of course, antimatter has opposite electrical attraction. If an antimatter plastic comb attracts antimatter styrofoam crumbs, those crumbs will be repelled by the matter plastic comb (luckily for them).
> Its neutrons are antineutrons made of a positron and antiproton.
Neutrons are made of on up quarks and two down quark (and a lot of gluons).
Antineutrons are made of on up antiquarks and two down antiquark (and a lot of gluons).
There are no (anti)protons or (anti)electrons inside (anti)neutrons.
> Of course, antimatter has opposite electrical attraction.
Nitpicking: attraction -> charge
> If an antimatter plastic comb attracts antimatter styrofoam crumbs, those crumbs will be repelled by the matter plastic comb (luckily for them).
IIRC the charge in the comb induces a charge in the crumbs. If the charge of the comb is X, the -X charges move closer to the comb, and the X charges move far away. And that those displaced charges create a dipole that is attracted to the comb.
So I think the anti-comb would attract the normal-crumbs and create a huge explossion.
- your antimatter qualifies for Free Shipping if you purchase additional eligible particles up to $100,000,000
- or choose default shipping (no containment used, wait for spontaneous virtual quantum particle in your vicinity) approx delivery date Jul 23rd 32,345 AD
Yeah. I bet in practice the liquid helium used to cool the trap is more dangerous than the actual antimater. It can cause cryogenic burns similar to frostbite, and if it suddenly boils off in a confined space (like inside a container or the back of a truck) it can displace oxygen and cause inert gas asphyxiation.
Of course both of these can be managed easily with appropriate procedures.
It is a bit like getting injured by pinching your hand in the hinge of the Velociraptor container in Jurrassic park. Not the first danger you would think of, but still present.
That exponent is still a lot larger than I would've expected for something measured in three digits of atoms. I thought it would've been in the double negative digits.
> There's a facility being built in Düsseldorf, Germany ... [and shipping] appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work
That "just" is not just a "just"! As far as I understand, given the low reserves of helium we have, using a largish quantity for an experiment must be a political decision as much as it has to be a technical one.
We vent the vast majority of helium by not separating it from natural gas, I still think the "shortage" of helium is still way overblown. We shouldn't be wasting it, but I don't believe the doom and gloom about helium. Basically every gas well has helium, and we aren't going to run out of gas wells anytime soon, it just costs a little more to extract because its a little bit lower percentage than the ideal wells.
The US has subsidized Helium via this mindset for a long time.
Where I get confused is, after all these years, surely others could make a bigger effort? (unless the nature of US reserves put us in a unique position)
Your body is subject to vastly more ionizing radiation every day than you'd receive from this entire batch of antimatter being introduced directly into your body. Check out the fun in an article like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_shower_%28physics%29 for the sorts of things that go on every day of your life.
I'm not an expert but, E=MC², so take the weight what they're moving around, multiply it by the speed of light squared, that's the amount of joules of energy you have, assuming perfect conversion.
It doesn't say how much material they moved though. If it was exactly 1 gram and they cancelled each other out perfectly (according to a quora answer, I refuse to trust AI but a random internet commenter is fine lmao), you've got 2 grams of mass converted to energy which is 180 terajoules or about 43 kilotons, which is about equivalent to 3 Hiroshima bombs.
Punching that into https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ gives a blast radius (of window destroying power) of 5.79 kilometers, or just over 100 km² of affected area.
They’re going to be shipping around much less than a gram. We haven’t generated close to a gram in total across all particle accelerators on earth so far.
lol at having 1 gram of antimatter. They are moving around dozens of atoms here. 1 gram of antimatter is off on humanity's capabilities by roughly a dozen orders of magnitude.
Fyi, the transport and storage of antimatter is very interesting to those developing nuclear weapons. An antimatter reaction could theoretically be used to pump a nuclear warhead, enabling perhaps smaller nukes than are currently feasible. That is IF one could store and transport usable amounts of antimatter for extended periods.
It's just too expensive. I think a quadrillion per gram. You can bribe the whole population with a million dollars or if you prefer a more classic method just give the enemy president a trillion dollars.
You wouldn't need anything near a gram. It isn't used for its explosive power but to create particles to increase the efficiency of the surrounding nuclear reaction, not actually contribute any explosive force on its own.
...started out in France but briefly crossed the border into Switzerland
"Anything to declare?"
"Yes, antimatter."
"Value for customs?"
"Um..."
Jokes aside, this is really neat. But we should enjoy this 'Wild West' while it lasts. I suspect in generations to come once it's easy to manufacture, antimatter will surely become a controlled substance.
Hopefully enough to afford another specially commissioned landscape by acclaimed painter Vincent van Gogh or a signed first edition by revered scriptwriter William Shakespeare
A picogram of antimatter carries about as much energy as a 90mph fastball. About 180 joules.
The energy released by an automobile collision is roughly 10 to 100 times that much.
Imagine you're in a car crash and someone throws a big rock at the side of your vehicle. Or you're driving and a bird hits the windshield. That's the sort of scale we're looking at here, it's really not catastrophic.
But it isn't. The reaction results in lots of energy but not much of an actual explosion, an explosion being an expansion of gas necessary to propel a bullet. Most of the energy would pass through/into the surrounding matter unconfined. Any gun would get hot and probably melt before the bullet started moving.
The bullet should consist of several parts. Maybe it's more rocket than a bullet.
1. Part that makes it move from the gun to the target. May be ordinary powder or reactive engine.
2. Part that creates an energy when bullet hits the target. That's where antimatter would be useful.
3. Part that converts energy to damage. For example compressed gas which gets very hot, expands and pushes shrapnel to hit things around with very big speed. There are many possibilities, but you need as much energy as possible to create as much damage, as possible in the end.
That would be a "shell" or warhead rather than a bullet. Bullets are generally inert bits of metal propelled from a barrel. Shells are are filled with explosives to detonate at some point once far away from the launching barrel.
Since you've already been pedantic here, I'll note that a 'shell' can also consist of pellets fired from a shotgun round, which are still 'inert bits of metal propelled from a barrel' but for at least a traditional round (e.x. 'buckshot') do not detonate later...
I got curious. If you put 1 picogram into Einstein's equation, you get about 90 joules of energy on annihilation. That's a bit more than half the energy delivered by a 90mph baseball or about half the energy of a defibrillator pulse.
Or wait, do you double it since you're annihilating a picogram of matter and antimatter?
Either way, that's a bonkers amount of energy from picograms of mass.
I would argue that antimatter still has the same mass as regular matter, so you have to pay regular import duties. On the other hand, if tachyons exist, they would have imaginary mass, for which the import duties would have to paid in imaginary money!
a big man came to me, tears in his eyes, great guy...Sir, he said sir, why do we let Europe screw us on anti-matter? they just make this stuff negative like it doesn't exists and they want us to pay us, when we invented the anti-matter...so unfair
Just like matter and antimatter, money and anti-money (debt) are created and destroyed together, and cancel each other out. When they come in contact, both are deleted.
All money creation, pretty much, is accompanied with creating a corresponding debt.
Bankruptcy sometimes deletes anti-money but the 'money' stays. I'm not sure what role interest payments have (I think that's a case of transferring money around). The bankruptcy thing seems a bit like baryon asymmetry.
However, there debt that keeps in taking. Such ist the case when in debt with a criminal Organisation. In which case current models are still lacking good explanations.
Aka a perpetual bond. But not always voluntary. A lot of things are like that though, it's a bit like paying a fine or a tax. Just the decision-making process is different.
Also, the amount of antimatter storable in a Penning Trap is limited such that its mass energy is comparable to the stored magnetic energy of the trap, which is small compared to the energy released by the same mass (as of the trap) of high explosives.
Make an antimatter liquid with strong intra-molecular bonds (e.g. anti-H2O) that is only slightly ionized. That would be easier to contain magnetically.
There was a time that was said about nukes. They didn't really make sense. We were only able to make minuscule amounts of U-235 / Plutonium at very high cost... and had we wanted evil bombs, we had a thousand ways already to make them.
Didn't stop people then. And it won't stop sufficiently criminal governments today.
I'm not saying we already have nukes in the sense that will stop people from wanting a better bomb. I'm saying we already have a much better bomb than antimatter so why would people invest in making a much shittier bomb?
And we don't even have to reach for nukes. Dynamite is also a better choice for blowing things up than antimatter.
Look up comparative damage stats for Tokyo and Hiroshima/Nagasaki in WWII. The nukes were nothing compared to firebombing.
Now do the same for Gaza and anywhere other than WWII Warsaw. Carpet bombing isn’t necessary if you can aim with precision at the support infrastructure of occupied structures.
You're making my point: We had comparatively worse and cheaper ways to butcher each others. And yet, we build nuclear bombs.
Carpet bombing is not meant for eliminating military targets - it's an act of state-sponsored terrorism to get a population to rise against its leaders. Only, it has been proven over and over again: That doesn't work and often results in the exact opposite, making them rally behind the flag against the barbarous enemy who would attack civilians. Which is why we stopped doing that. Mostly.
Energy. Creating a single anti-hydrogen atom requires an absurd amount of energy to first create a collision in a particle accelerator and then capture that anti-hydrogen before it eliminates against another atom.
Only about 0.01% of the energy used to operate the particle collider creates antimatter, the vast majority of which is impossible to capture. All in all, the efficiency of the entire process - if you were to measure it in the e^2=(pc)^2+(mc^2)^2 sense - is probably on the order of 1e-9 or worse.
Has there been research on more efficient ways to generate antiprotons? (By the way anti-hydrogen isn't how you would store it as anti-hydrogen can't be trapped.)
Nothing we do creates it at any kind of scale, and it's a pain in the ass to store.
Not to mention the only way to create it is with energy (it doesn't exist on Earth), and we can only do so at terrible efficiencies. So even theoretically it's pretty bad.
What you really need here is a zero point energy stabilized meta-material lattice that interacts with matter the same way as it does antimatter, since it's a structure composed of the lowest form of energy. It can manage the boundary between them. That would make it a lot less energy intensive to transport antimatter.
> If the delivery can be made successfully—and it appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work—the new facility in Germany should allow measurements with a precision of over 100 times better than anything that has been achieved at CERN.
Hmm. It sounds good until you realize that's two decimal places. Two decimal places is a pretty marginal gain for a lot of work.
ugh... Needing more than 4 significant digits is a pretty baseline requirement for precision physics experiments meant to falsify various candidate theories. 2 new significant digits is a vast parameter space that now can be excluded.
Needing more than 4 significant digits happens to be crucially important for mundane boring stuff like the GPS navigation in your maps app working.
Everybody think that the properties of a proton and an antiproton are equal. As far as we know, that is true, but it's better to confirm that experimentally, and we need more precision to detect subtle differences. Two more decimals places would be nice.
There are a few properties of other particles with like 8 decimal places calculated theoretically and measured experimentally, and they are useful to validate the current standard model.
Actually, we expect some very very tiny asymmetry between matter and antimatter, but no one has measured that. I'm not sure how it would be visible in antiprotons. Perhaps a very tiny difference in the magnetic moment. Perhaps in the 17th digit that we will never measure. [1]
In any case it's interesting to confirm that our current models are correct or not.
[1] I'm not an expert in this area, but IIRC the problem is something like there is a little chance that the antiproton emits a photon that creates a electron and a positron, then it use the week force to transform into a muon that use the weak force to transform into a tauon that use the weak force to transform into an electron that colides with the original positron that was not doing nothing interesting meanwhile. Nobody is sure if all this transformations introduces a complex phase (a complex number of modulo 1) that cause a difference when you start with a antiproton instead of a proton. So, if there is a difference, it's probably something weird with a lot of intermediate virtual particles that cause a tiny difference in the 17th digit, or perhaps in the 1326th digit.
Too late to edit: I think the note [1] needs to be fixed. I think it's a cycle of quarks, down -> strange -> bottom -> down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark#Weak_interaction Anyway, before constructing a giant particle accelerator to measure that, better ask a particle physics expert :) .
Last week I had the chance to visit CERN's Antimatter Factory, and let me tell you I was feeling like a child on Christmas Day.
The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive. That they are considering sending it hundreds of km away is mind blowing.
I designed some of the kit in that building! (Specifically for the alpha G experiment) Super proud of it.
That is super cool, you should be proud. I took plenty of pictures of all the machines xD
Imagine inventing something like a better coffee carafe and being able to say this about a sizable portion of notable structures.
Not bad for a cat, nice work. Clearly you don't work in the cybernetics division.
Not technically a cat. Evolved from the ships cat.
Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal. Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal. Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal. Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal. Today's fish is trout a la creme. Enjoy your meal.
I will!
> The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive.
Also the persistence that is required because of the low "return on investment" is staggering. Another article linked from this one said:
> The authors had to mix 10 million positrons with 700 million antiprotons in order to get get 38 certifiable antihydrogen events.
> picograms
I needed to know how much antimatter weighed and this article seemed helpful (though I am poorly placed to know if it’s correct).
https://gizmodo.com/how-much-does-antimatter-weigh-492195828
The same as matter basically.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10533407/
The interesting idea behind it is basically that for antimatter a potential wall, imagine a step function which is 0 for negative and 1 for positive and a wave that hits the wall from the negative to the positives, in theory it cannot propagate in the wall, turns out that one solution can propagate in that wall and that's antimatter: It basically sees the potential as inverted.
So since people were thinking about that they started considering that if it happens for EM interaction it could be the case for gravitation, that lead to wonder if the antimatter had different properties in that department.
From a pure theory point of view the mass of the particles and anti particles should be identical but they might have "fallen up" instead of falling down.
Note that if there are significant differences this would be extremely interesting but I am not deep enough into exotic theories that take into account those exotic cases to make more statements about the matter.
>> "fallen up" instead of falling down.
Which may have been true in a world where gravity was a charge or like the other forces. But it isn't. Everything with mass has mass. There is no detection of any sort of anti-mass, no matter the exotic possibilities such a thing would enable.
Does annhilation produce gravity relevant events as in lokal dark matter increase?
That's awesome. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting CERN too. Curious, what part of the visit stood out as especially impressive? Last I checked, there was a pretty long waiting list for tours.
If you want to visit Atlas (control room) or CERN’s first accelerator (a synchrocyclotron) just show up in the morning when the visitor center opens. The tour guides are often passionate scientists. The museum is worth visiting, you’ll get to see the first www server (Tim-Berner Lee’s nextcube). The live shows are well put together. And everything is pretty much free of charge.
The only thing I can think of that has a waiting period is if you want to visit the actual tunnels, you can only visit them in between experiments (every 10-20 years maybe even less often).
More info: https://visit.cern/
Can you visit CMS?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Muon_Solenoid
Per https://cms.cern/interact-with-cms/on-site-visits, you can visit CMS if you book ~1 week out.
Thank you!
The presentations/videos talk extensively about CMS' detector (if I remember right). I'm not sure about visiting the control center, you would need to inquire if/when they do that.
That is great news. The last time I checked, there was a long waitlist and needed to book online (maybe COVID-related?). Appreciate you sharing this story.
This link might interest you: https://cms.cern/interact-with-cms/on-site-visits
If the timing works out for you, you'll be able to visit both, the visitor center and CMS!
Definitely will check it out. Thanks on a subatomic scale!
I worked at CERN a few years ago, so assuming they haven't build any new amazing facilities, these would be my top picks:
- Any of the experiments really, but especially ATLAS is impressive.
- The antimatter factory. I found that the guides there are usually very passionate.
- The control centre if you can get a tour (this is the facility I delivered software to).
I work for the control group at another accelerator, so we were visiting and meeting their control guys. Super friendly people all of them, they treated us like kings... and their control centre is bigger than our whole facility xD
So they allowed you to know that you are in the control group? Doesn't that introduce bias ;)
Sorry, I don't understand your comment :/
He was referring that in many experiments (especially in medical/biological) you usually have a control group, e.g. the group that is being given a placebo.
Took me a moment to understand it as well :)
Ah shit, you are right. I worked at a medical research center aeons ago so I should have known, but I am still dizzy from the jet lag xD
Thank you.
I've seen this expressed before, but every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures?
To me things like tokamak fusion reactors or rockets or even places like the massive piles of pipe work outside of SpaceX's launch site feel way cooler.
When I look at that pile, I see hundreds or thousands of devices that need to be working in concert to produce a meaningful result. Devices that need to be triggered exactly when the particle bunch travels by at near speed of light. These devices then generate data that needs to be stored somewhere and in a way that is later useful to the scientists.
The complexity hiding within the pile is immense, and that is what makes it impressive to me.
> These devices then generate data that needs to be stored somewhere
That part appears to severely downplay the absolutely mind-bending amount of data and the timewise density of it.
https://information-technology.web.cern.ch/sites/default/fil...
I see about the same thing as you do, only I am basically also picturing Ghostbusters who also had some very specific tooling for trapping, containing, and transporting ghosts, which was all central to the plot of the original film.
I can just foresee a future asshole European mayor who swaggers into the CERN remote antimatter facility and shuts it all down, triggering Armageddon and a new rampage by the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Perhaps it depends on what you work on day-to-day because "a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics" sounds _extremely_ cool to me!
Man, I've been in their underground part, every 5 years they open for public and open the detectors themselves. It was by huge margin by far the best executed engineering of any type I ever saw, and I don't consider myself a nerd in this area. Every tiny detail was simply perfect, not a speck of dust, all cables aligned perfectly etc. Seeing inner parts of these massive detector tubes (maybe 10x20m ?) was the pinnacle of the show.
Pictures simply don't do it justice. One can't replace physical travelling and experiencing things (and people) for whatever purpose and this shows it well.
That being said, since I live not far from there, I certainly hope that containment is flawless, don't want to experience matter-antimatter annihilation of non-trivial amounts anywhere near my kids, or myself for that matter (NIMBYism at its best, get your damn antimatter off my lawn!)
"Man, I've been in their underground part, every 5 years they open for public and open the detectors themselves."
This isn't every 5 years, the detectors are available for the public to visit every winter, and often at other times of the year as well.
Because we are massive science nerds. I have been interested in this kind of stuff since I was a little kid. Which leads to the second point...
I ended up working at another accelerator facility, so even though I am an IT guy, I actually understand what I am looking at, which helps to increase the enjoyment.
A lot of tourism is just feeling a place. You can often get better views of a place in photographs than in real life. And yet the presence feels as if it adds something.
I remember being literally stopped in my tracks by the Rosetta Stone. (It was closing and they were shooing us out.) There's nothing there that I haven't seen far more clearly (and it's not as if I can read any of its three languages), and yet somehow it felt Important.
Irrational, but real.
> every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it.
(Maybe I'm saying the obvious; sorry if that's the case ...) In perception, knowledge greatly affects what we 'see', on a physiological level - our brain's perceptual function is not at all purely sensory, but wired into the rest of our minds. People who have never drunk wine may say it's just unpleasant and a strong taste, and why drink it? People who know it well can perceive all sorts of things, from flavors to colors and more.
With knowledge, the wires, magnets, and electronics, like the sensations of wine, will reveal themselves. A good, passionate source can help ...
> just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics
You just described a tokamak fusion reactor. So at the end of the day you either know exactly what you're looking at and are in awe of the entire achievement, or have no idea what you're looking at and maybe are in awe of the massive pile of engineeringy looking bits and bobs.
Same effect visiting any massive chemical plant or oil refinery (because the processes usually require a lot of pipes, huge containers, and so on), that make you wonder "how on Earth do they even remember where everything is, let alone design and build it".
Not much different from art if you think about it. You can see a masterpiece painting, or some paint on a piece of cloth.
But for all of the above, when you know what those are, the impressive effect is amplified.
The emergency copper quench conductors the thickness of my arm were pretty cool to see.
You got to realize they've built a giant circular vacuum tube surrounded by superconducting magnetic jackets that can steer and accelerate a particle beam (actually two going opposite directions), and giant cameras/calorimeters that image photons and other decaying particles from the beam collisions on the micrometer spatial scale. Each component individually may not be grand of scale and complexity but when taken as a whole it works together in amazing ways.
The speed of light is a significant limitation at these kinds of scales.
It's not just a massive pile of wiring and magnets etc, it's a massive pile of wiring and magnets which kicks particles around a race track the size of a small town, with absolutely insane timing precision before dumping them into targets the size of buildings, all generating unimaginably huge volumes of data which have to recorded in nanoseconds.
what i saw of cern was a beautiful campus with ongoing cricket matches on the lawn, lots of offices and computers, and a great cafeteria.
my brother worked down the hall from tbl, and we stopped by, but he was out. brother’s boss (mdm wu, of quark fame), was out of town too.
brother was the vms admin, and would bitterly complain that mdm wu never cleaned out her mail spool, and it was now a ruinous 40mb.
st genis is quaint and nice to visit, with views of mt blanc.
One great way to enjoy the visit and get an idea of what you are looking at is to pick something very specific, like some connector or box, and ask what it does. Then ask what happens when it fails. The answer to the later question is almost invariably interesting - even in relatively mundane places like a power plant or fire truck.
>So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures?
Yes: it is massive. There are few bigger experimental setups in the world.
A telescope is "just a mirror", yet any modern large telescope is awe-inspiring by virtue of its size.
You are getting downvoted but it made me wonder (I visited CERN a few years ago). I guess there are two aspects in play. One, the pile is massive, which naturally inspires awe, especially in person. Two, I know that what I'm looking at is actually a unique super advanced piece of technology, which took countless hours to produce, and that influences how one sees it.
It would be the same as someone visiting a modern art museum, and see weird spashes of paint and a banana nailed to a wall.
It's all in the eyes of the beholder.
You know, I never considered that it would be open to the public / tourism, I just added it to my bucket list.
I mean I don't know much about the science they do other than the popular science summaries, but it's super interesting.
Reading around this, i learn that something similar was done in 1993:
https://cfp.physics.northwestern.edu/documents/Transport.pdf
They built a trap, loaded it with electrons as a test, and drove 5000 miles from Martinez, CA (where the magnet was built) to Cambridge, MA. They mention some unexpected trouble after crossing the Rockies - the steadily increasing atmospheric pressure during the descent reduced helium boiloff rate, which reduced helium exhaust flow, and allowed moist air to flow back through the exhaust pipe, resulting in ice buildup. They cleared the blockage, but in doing so, lost the electrons!
I believe that they never repeated the trip with antiprotons. But hopefully the CERN delivery crew have learned from the experience, and won't run into similar trouble coming down from the Alps.
It sounds like helium is still presenting a challenge:
> ...changes in the truck's speed produced turbulence in the liquid helium, making measurements of its presence unreliable. Levels had dropped from about 75 percent of maximum to 30 percent by the time the system was reconnected, suggesting that liquid helium presents the key limiting factor in shipping.
This was after just a 4km stint around CERN campus.
Not sure why, but I found it amusing when they said that the antimatter "reached speeds of over 40 km/hour." Not sure what the speeds are at the point of its creation (there are knowledgeable folks on here who will know, I'm sure), but that must seem sloooooow in comparison.
"We accelerated the antimatter to speeds of over 40 km/h!"
"Good lord, using what technology?"
"A DAF LF 180."
Although i have no idea what actual make or model they used - i was appalled to see that it was not stated in the materials and methods section of the paper. There's a photo in a news piece showing it's a small rigid-sided lorry:
https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take...
The point was that the van driving around with the containment device reached 40mph and this establishes that the containment device can handle a bit of rattling around
They only had regular Protons in it for this test though. The point was to see if the Protons were still there after the 40 mph journey in a van
> Not sure what the speeds are at the point of its creation
That will be the speed of light for you. Not exactly the speed of light, but 0.999... with a few 9's.
The anti proton was very fast, but it needs to capture a positron to become an antimatter hydrogen atom. This happens after the anti proton was slowed down.
Reading this makes me so happy! Even if it by itself might not be the biggest science news, we know about antimatter for a long time and we are still talking about a few atoms only, but the news that people are actually handling antimatter to the point of transporting it with a truck, just feels a bit like sci-fi actually happening.
Exactly! This is just a prerequisite step before shipping it to a warp drive factory. Or, some similar sci-fi in my mind right now.
I agree, news like this make me optimistic too!
one of the most interesting of antimatter experiments is that if they somehow showed antimatter only experience 60% gravity, that will be huge. (earlier result of measuring antimatter’s gravity showed they don’t posses antigravity, but they seems to experiences less gravity. I guess a dedicated follow up experiment will likely get better measurement on whether antimatter indeed experience less gravity.)
This is incorrect. The only measurement of antimatter gravity so far by ALPHA-g resulted in no difference to normal matter within the experimental uncertainty [1]. This is not surprising, since any difference would violate conservation of energy.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06527-1
I believe this was already settled? Didn’t it just experience gravity the same way?
Antimater has positively charged electrons (positrons) and negatively charged protons (antiprotons). Its neutrons are antineutrons made of a positron and antiproton.
So just the charges are swapped around.
Charges interact with electric fields.
Gravity is related to mass. It doesn't matter whether the bulk of the mass comes from negatively or positively charged particles.
Of course, antimatter has opposite electrical attraction. If an antimatter plastic comb attracts antimatter styrofoam crumbs, those crumbs will be repelled by the matter plastic comb (luckily for them).
> Its neutrons are antineutrons made of a positron and antiproton.
Neutrons are made of on up quarks and two down quark (and a lot of gluons).
Antineutrons are made of on up antiquarks and two down antiquark (and a lot of gluons).
There are no (anti)protons or (anti)electrons inside (anti)neutrons.
> Of course, antimatter has opposite electrical attraction.
Nitpicking: attraction -> charge
> If an antimatter plastic comb attracts antimatter styrofoam crumbs, those crumbs will be repelled by the matter plastic comb (luckily for them).
IIRC the charge in the comb induces a charge in the crumbs. If the charge of the comb is X, the -X charges move closer to the comb, and the X charges move far away. And that those displaced charges create a dipole that is attracted to the comb.
So I think the anti-comb would attract the normal-crumbs and create a huge explossion.
So…wait , can anti-mass particles exist? Like an inverse Higgs boson?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass
It would be top sci-fi if anti-matter had anti-gravity.
- your antimatter qualifies for Free Shipping if you purchase additional eligible particles up to $100,000,000
- or choose default shipping (no containment used, wait for spontaneous virtual quantum particle in your vicinity) approx delivery date Jul 23rd 32,345 AD
Why is there not a picture of the antimatter containment device? I hope it looks appropriately sci-fi.
Not really.
https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take...
Not even a cool new hazmat placard.
This thing? I think it looks super cool. An 80-20 rectangle stuffed with science stuff.
https://home.cern/sites/default/files/2024-10/1st-moving-cra...
Missed opportunity to slap on a big warning label saying "ANTIMATTER CONTAINMENT"
That’s because it’s not really a hazardous material. 70 antiprotons annihilating with 70 protons releases a grand total of 2×10⁻⁸ Joules.
Yeah. I bet in practice the liquid helium used to cool the trap is more dangerous than the actual antimater. It can cause cryogenic burns similar to frostbite, and if it suddenly boils off in a confined space (like inside a container or the back of a truck) it can displace oxygen and cause inert gas asphyxiation.
Of course both of these can be managed easily with appropriate procedures.
It is a bit like getting injured by pinching your hand in the hinge of the Velociraptor container in Jurrassic park. Not the first danger you would think of, but still present.
That exponent is still a lot larger than I would've expected for something measured in three digits of atoms. I thought it would've been in the double negative digits.
Yea, c² is pretty big.
Apparently there is no UN number for antimatter, disappointing.
We could use UN 2910 or maybe UN 0357
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> There's a facility being built in Düsseldorf, Germany ... [and shipping] appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work
That "just" is not just a "just"! As far as I understand, given the low reserves of helium we have, using a largish quantity for an experiment must be a political decision as much as it has to be a technical one.
We vent the vast majority of helium by not separating it from natural gas, I still think the "shortage" of helium is still way overblown. We shouldn't be wasting it, but I don't believe the doom and gloom about helium. Basically every gas well has helium, and we aren't going to run out of gas wells anytime soon, it just costs a little more to extract because its a little bit lower percentage than the ideal wells.
Extraction is the challenge...
The US has subsidized Helium via this mindset for a long time.
Where I get confused is, after all these years, surely others could make a bigger effort? (unless the nature of US reserves put us in a unique position)
What will be the blast radius if there is an accident?
They're moving particles around. Not big blobs of the stuff. Any "blast radius" would not extend beyond the container.
No-one will be exploding helicopters above the Vatican today.
What about warp drives?
Each antiproton annihilation releases 0.3 nJ. So for ~100 antiprotons, one would get 30 nJ which is equivalent to 7 picograms of TNT.
That would be enough to neutralize one Amoeba cell
What's that in dB(modern nukes)?
Now, is it safe to eat?
Probably, but I doubt there'd be much flavour
well as everyone knows you first have to marinate the antiprotons, as they're mostly eaten for their texture, not taste.
Might be a little spicy
Your body is subject to vastly more ionizing radiation every day than you'd receive from this entire batch of antimatter being introduced directly into your body. Check out the fun in an article like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_shower_%28physics%29 for the sorts of things that go on every day of your life.
I'm not an expert but, E=MC², so take the weight what they're moving around, multiply it by the speed of light squared, that's the amount of joules of energy you have, assuming perfect conversion.
It doesn't say how much material they moved though. If it was exactly 1 gram and they cancelled each other out perfectly (according to a quora answer, I refuse to trust AI but a random internet commenter is fine lmao), you've got 2 grams of mass converted to energy which is 180 terajoules or about 43 kilotons, which is about equivalent to 3 Hiroshima bombs.
Punching that into https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ gives a blast radius (of window destroying power) of 5.79 kilometers, or just over 100 km² of affected area.
They’re going to be shipping around much less than a gram. We haven’t generated close to a gram in total across all particle accelerators on earth so far.
Producing a gram would cost ~$2.7 quadrillion - https://ket.org/program/physics-girl/why-this-stuff-costs-27...
lol at having 1 gram of antimatter. They are moving around dozens of atoms here. 1 gram of antimatter is off on humanity's capabilities by roughly a dozen orders of magnitude.
"Portable Antimatter Containment is here, and slowly getting better." is not a sentence I expected to write to friends, but I just did.
Fyi, the transport and storage of antimatter is very interesting to those developing nuclear weapons. An antimatter reaction could theoretically be used to pump a nuclear warhead, enabling perhaps smaller nukes than are currently feasible. That is IF one could store and transport usable amounts of antimatter for extended periods.
It's just too expensive. I think a quadrillion per gram. You can bribe the whole population with a million dollars or if you prefer a more classic method just give the enemy president a trillion dollars.
You wouldn't need anything near a gram. It isn't used for its explosive power but to create particles to increase the efficiency of the surrounding nuclear reaction, not actually contribute any explosive force on its own.
Do you have a link that explais that? Asking for a friend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter-catalyzed_nuclear_p...
I wonder which UN number they put on the orange plates...
...started out in France but briefly crossed the border into Switzerland
"Anything to declare?"
"Yes, antimatter."
"Value for customs?"
"Um..."
Jokes aside, this is really neat. But we should enjoy this 'Wild West' while it lasts. I suspect in generations to come once it's easy to manufacture, antimatter will surely become a controlled substance.
> "Anything to declare?"
> "Yes, antimatter."
It offsets your other customs declarations.
CERN preparing a portable antimatter container right around the election of a new Pope? Sounds familiar [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_%26_Demons_(film)
Dan Brown is definitely taking notes.
Or on contrary expecting some sort of royalties
Hopefully enough to afford another specially commissioned landscape by acclaimed painter Vincent van Gogh or a signed first edition by revered scriptwriter William Shakespeare
You'll enjoy this review: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-o...
Edit: Indeed you were quoting it :)
oh man, the conspiracy nuts are going to have fun with this.
If I recall correctly, pope Francis was actually afraid the LHC would "open a gate to hell".
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Isn’t it dangerous to transport antimatter in a truck? What would happen if it got into a bad accident?
The truck will probably crush you to death, the same way it would if it was loaded with oranges.
Hmm actually this particular truck will go slower than one full of oranges so you have a better chance of survival.
A few stray gamma rays - the quantities we can make at the moment are vanishingly small compared to macroscopic objects.
A picogram of antimatter carries about as much energy as a 90mph fastball. About 180 joules.
The energy released by an automobile collision is roughly 10 to 100 times that much.
Imagine you're in a car crash and someone throws a big rock at the side of your vehicle. Or you're driving and a bird hits the windshield. That's the sort of scale we're looking at here, it's really not catastrophic.
It would be terrible. But no more terrible than a FCL of shien crap.
Antimatter is an ultimate explosive. I wonder when we will have bullets with antimatter.
But it isn't. The reaction results in lots of energy but not much of an actual explosion, an explosion being an expansion of gas necessary to propel a bullet. Most of the energy would pass through/into the surrounding matter unconfined. Any gun would get hot and probably melt before the bullet started moving.
The bullet should consist of several parts. Maybe it's more rocket than a bullet.
1. Part that makes it move from the gun to the target. May be ordinary powder or reactive engine.
2. Part that creates an energy when bullet hits the target. That's where antimatter would be useful.
3. Part that converts energy to damage. For example compressed gas which gets very hot, expands and pushes shrapnel to hit things around with very big speed. There are many possibilities, but you need as much energy as possible to create as much damage, as possible in the end.
That would be a "shell" or warhead rather than a bullet. Bullets are generally inert bits of metal propelled from a barrel. Shells are are filled with explosives to detonate at some point once far away from the launching barrel.
Since you've already been pedantic here, I'll note that a 'shell' can also consist of pellets fired from a shotgun round, which are still 'inert bits of metal propelled from a barrel' but for at least a traditional round (e.x. 'buckshot') do not detonate later...
At this point it won't make things worse I guess
can you imagine being the dude that drops it - yes i know that is not how it works
I got curious. If you put 1 picogram into Einstein's equation, you get about 90 joules of energy on annihilation. That's a bit more than half the energy delivered by a 90mph baseball or about half the energy of a defibrillator pulse.
Or wait, do you double it since you're annihilating a picogram of matter and antimatter?
Either way, that's a bonkers amount of energy from picograms of mass.
A Nobel prize is due to the first person that proves whether exporting antimatter results in negative import duties or not.
I would argue that antimatter still has the same mass as regular matter, so you have to pay regular import duties. On the other hand, if tachyons exist, they would have imaginary mass, for which the import duties would have to paid in imaginary money!
It is really a complex problem.
It’s difficult to get to the root of it.
a big man came to me, tears in his eyes, great guy...Sir, he said sir, why do we let Europe screw us on anti-matter? they just make this stuff negative like it doesn't exists and they want us to pay us, when we invented the anti-matter...so unfair
Clearly it would result in tariffs paid in anti-money…
For those who missed it, “antimony” is element 51 so it’s not just a pun on “anti-“ but a reference to another element.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimony
Just like matter and antimatter, money and anti-money (debt) are created and destroyed together, and cancel each other out. When they come in contact, both are deleted.
All money creation, pretty much, is accompanied with creating a corresponding debt.
Bankruptcy sometimes deletes anti-money but the 'money' stays. I'm not sure what role interest payments have (I think that's a case of transferring money around). The bankruptcy thing seems a bit like baryon asymmetry.
However, there debt that keeps in taking. Such ist the case when in debt with a criminal Organisation. In which case current models are still lacking good explanations.
Aka a perpetual bond. But not always voluntary. A lot of things are like that though, it's a bit like paying a fine or a tax. Just the decision-making process is different.
An igNobel, for sure
Clearly - but in physics or economics?
Well there is no nobel price in economics[1] so probably a nobel peace price for ending trade wars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sveriges_riksbanks_pris_i_ekon...
Don't cross the streams.
I think crossing the streams is exactly how a particle accelerator works
Do you think they can overnight me an antikindle?
The bank servicing the transaction will have to upgrade their internal software for money representation.
Order an antikindle and your bank balance goes UP? I like the sound of that.
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If you can ship antimatter, you can drop it on people. Luckily, we are still orders of magnitude away from a bomb-sized amount.
Making antimatter bombs really doesn't make sense. We can only make miniscule amounts of the stuff at very high cost.
If you want evil bombs, we already have nukes.
Also, the amount of antimatter storable in a Penning Trap is limited such that its mass energy is comparable to the stored magnetic energy of the trap, which is small compared to the energy released by the same mass (as of the trap) of high explosives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma
(see discussion of the "Brillouin Limit")
Make an antimatter liquid with strong intra-molecular bonds (e.g. anti-H2O) that is only slightly ionized. That would be easier to contain magnetically.
How do you propose to do that? Getting any antielement beyond antihydrogen would require doing nuclear fusion on antiprotons.
There was a time that was said about nukes. They didn't really make sense. We were only able to make minuscule amounts of U-235 / Plutonium at very high cost... and had we wanted evil bombs, we had a thousand ways already to make them.
Didn't stop people then. And it won't stop sufficiently criminal governments today.
I'm not saying we already have nukes in the sense that will stop people from wanting a better bomb. I'm saying we already have a much better bomb than antimatter so why would people invest in making a much shittier bomb?
And we don't even have to reach for nukes. Dynamite is also a better choice for blowing things up than antimatter.
Look up comparative damage stats for Tokyo and Hiroshima/Nagasaki in WWII. The nukes were nothing compared to firebombing.
Now do the same for Gaza and anywhere other than WWII Warsaw. Carpet bombing isn’t necessary if you can aim with precision at the support infrastructure of occupied structures.
You're making my point: We had comparatively worse and cheaper ways to butcher each others. And yet, we build nuclear bombs.
Carpet bombing is not meant for eliminating military targets - it's an act of state-sponsored terrorism to get a population to rise against its leaders. Only, it has been proven over and over again: That doesn't work and often results in the exact opposite, making them rally behind the flag against the barbarous enemy who would attack civilians. Which is why we stopped doing that. Mostly.
What's the biggest barrier to creating a lot of antimatter?
Energy. Creating a single anti-hydrogen atom requires an absurd amount of energy to first create a collision in a particle accelerator and then capture that anti-hydrogen before it eliminates against another atom.
Only about 0.01% of the energy used to operate the particle collider creates antimatter, the vast majority of which is impossible to capture. All in all, the efficiency of the entire process - if you were to measure it in the e^2=(pc)^2+(mc^2)^2 sense - is probably on the order of 1e-9 or worse.
Has there been research on more efficient ways to generate antiprotons? (By the way anti-hydrogen isn't how you would store it as anti-hydrogen can't be trapped.)
Anti-hydrogen is routinely trapped in magnetic traps at CERN.
If anyone is curious how, I think this is vaguely the idea: https://alpha.web.cern.ch/science/2-trapping-antihydrogen
tl;dr: strong magnetic fields in a certain configuration since in a strong enough field anti-hydrogen acts like little bar magnets.
Nothing we do creates it at any kind of scale, and it's a pain in the ass to store.
Not to mention the only way to create it is with energy (it doesn't exist on Earth), and we can only do so at terrible efficiencies. So even theoretically it's pretty bad.
I can't help but think of Angels and Demons here...
Why not use Amazon prime
What you really need here is a zero point energy stabilized meta-material lattice that interacts with matter the same way as it does antimatter, since it's a structure composed of the lowest form of energy. It can manage the boundary between them. That would make it a lot less energy intensive to transport antimatter.
> If the delivery can be made successfully—and it appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work—the new facility in Germany should allow measurements with a precision of over 100 times better than anything that has been achieved at CERN.
Hmm. It sounds good until you realize that's two decimal places. Two decimal places is a pretty marginal gain for a lot of work.
Two decimal places is a shit ton of precision though.
A one inch gap is immense compared to a .01 inch gap.
Oh? When was the last time you needed 6.02 for Avogadro's number rather than 6?
Why is it that we don't bother trying to get more accurate than 6.023 in any context?
ugh... Needing more than 4 significant digits is a pretty baseline requirement for precision physics experiments meant to falsify various candidate theories. 2 new significant digits is a vast parameter space that now can be excluded.
Needing more than 4 significant digits happens to be crucially important for mundane boring stuff like the GPS navigation in your maps app working.
Surely the precision you need for any measurement is entirely situation-dependent?
Everybody think that the properties of a proton and an antiproton are equal. As far as we know, that is true, but it's better to confirm that experimentally, and we need more precision to detect subtle differences. Two more decimals places would be nice.
There are a few properties of other particles with like 8 decimal places calculated theoretically and measured experimentally, and they are useful to validate the current standard model.
Actually, we expect some very very tiny asymmetry between matter and antimatter, but no one has measured that. I'm not sure how it would be visible in antiprotons. Perhaps a very tiny difference in the magnetic moment. Perhaps in the 17th digit that we will never measure. [1]
In any case it's interesting to confirm that our current models are correct or not.
[1] I'm not an expert in this area, but IIRC the problem is something like there is a little chance that the antiproton emits a photon that creates a electron and a positron, then it use the week force to transform into a muon that use the weak force to transform into a tauon that use the weak force to transform into an electron that colides with the original positron that was not doing nothing interesting meanwhile. Nobody is sure if all this transformations introduces a complex phase (a complex number of modulo 1) that cause a difference when you start with a antiproton instead of a proton. So, if there is a difference, it's probably something weird with a lot of intermediate virtual particles that cause a tiny difference in the 17th digit, or perhaps in the 1326th digit.
Too late to edit: I think the note [1] needs to be fixed. I think it's a cycle of quarks, down -> strange -> bottom -> down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark#Weak_interaction Anyway, before constructing a giant particle accelerator to measure that, better ask a particle physics expert :) .
Do you write O(n^2) code when there's an O(1) algorithm?
2 decimal places is the difference between employment and ownership. 100k vs 10MM. That is the comparison you really want to think about.
No, 100k and 10,000k each have one decimal place. Two decimal places is the difference between 100k and 104k.
Wouldn't it be the difference between 100k and 140k? 105k rounded to lose two decimals of precision would still be 100k.