Air Force Researching Antimatter Weapons 1062
mlmitton writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons. Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power, e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy. Perhaps more interesting, after an initial inquiry by the Chronicle in the summer, the Air Force issued a gag order that prohibits any Air Force employee from discussing antimatter research or funding."
[little john] WHAT? [/little john] (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to see their containment schemes so that the anti matter doesn't bump the bomb casing wall and annihilate in storage or in transit.
On a funny note this nut [antimatterenergy.com] whom I've met in person, claims that comets are made of pure antimatter. Riiiight. That should bring production costs down
Re:Why, cause nuclear bombs aren't sCary enough? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps one of you big-brained types could enlighten me? Thanks.
Some things I don't understand about anti-matter.. (Score:4, Interesting)
- What about the radiation involved? We've measured the rays that result from minor, single-atom collisions, but what happens when the collision is actually big enough to damage something?
- How do you propel something like this? Magnets? Or am I wrong in assuming anti-matter can't touch anything?
Anyways, maybe some smarter
Re:Why, cause nuclear bombs aren't sCary enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm scared shitless either way.
Probably useless (Score:5, Interesting)
With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6 billion
The only reason I could see it being useful is if you needed an extremely high energy density. "Bullets" with a magnetically suspended speck of antimatter might be handy. They would be virtually undetectable by radar and pack a huge punch. Perhaps the low weights would be useful for space warfare?
My guess is this has been going on for a long time (Score:4, Interesting)
Like any technology, antimatter can be used for good or evil. Ever get a PET scan [unimelb.edu.au]? That's antimatter right in the middle of your body. Don't worry, you won't grow a third leg or anything from it.
I'm sure the DoD is aware of this, but gamma-ray bursts can cause nuclear changes, which can create radioactive particles that linger. It's not nearly the problem of traditional fallout, and is even be "negligible" for a sufficiently large value of "negligible." Much more likely is ionization which can kill living tissue and cause chemical changes to non-living materials. This can cause buildings to become less structurally sound, for example. However, absent the "negligible" secondary radiation I mentioned above, a conquering army can roll in without wearing radiation suits.
This is long term research, folks (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article:
"about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995."
and
"With present techniques, the price tag for 100-billionths of a gram of antimatter would be $6 billion"
from which we can calculate that blowing up a building with antimatter will cost about 3 trillion dollars. (And tens or hundreds of millions for the equipment to confine the antimatter until you want it to detonate, but that is negligible in comparison.)
Also notice that while the antimatter may be the ultimately compact explosive, the containment equipment required will increase the size of a warhead by many orders of magnitude. No antimatter rifle bullets anytime soon.
Freedom of Information Act (Score:1, Interesting)
Orion (Score:5, Interesting)
I think everyone's spinning it wrong. The most useful thing you can do with lots of positrons would be to build an antimater-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion [wikipedia.org] engine. With a good source for lots of positrons, you should be able to build nukes small enough to be useful.
Other uses... (Score:4, Interesting)
How efficiently is this stuff converted to energy once it contacts matter? Could it be used to say generate electricity (or whatever, heat/light etc..)?
It would make a great way to clean up current nuclear waste if you could get the costs of production down. Just dump some antimatter on some nuclear waste (in a controlled manner of course), and voila, energy AND less waste
Just a thought...
Re:Funny the way the article is worded... (Score:3, Interesting)
The energy/mass ratio makes antimatter a good source of energy to use to overcome gravity.
As for weaponry, mass is a factor, but not the most important one. Making anti-matter is hard. Making stuff explode is relatively easy.
Anti-Matter (Score:1, Interesting)
Second, using it as a weapon. There would not be radiation, just lots of light, because it isn't radioactive in any real sense. It doesn't leave any trace at all, just a large flash of light and then a hole where there used to be normal matter. You can't even detect anti-matter in its normal state since it doesn't emit anything. It would be like trying to detect hydrogen (easiest antimatter to make for obvious reasons).
Now, the potential for a weapon is absolute. People will worry about that, since its so easy to make as long as you have antimatter. Just make the containment field turn off as soon as it hits. Its an understandably dangerous idea, but we have to realize that its this way with any power source. First, you learn to use it without control. Then you learn to control it to fuel a power source. Take fission. First the bomb. Later, nuke plants. Now fusion. We have hydrogen bombs, we are trying to make (controlled) fusion plants now. So first we use it as a weapon, then we learn how to control it (to make the Enterprise).
Now, as a weapon, I can't imagine its the worst thing in the world. Only large, (presumably) responsible countries could make it. We have somthing close to its destructive power now with the H bomb, but this one would have no radiation afterward causing untold pain and suffereing from fallout. Just the initial flash. And we haven't used the H bomb yet, god-willing we will never use this. If the war ever comes and Mars attacks though, I would love to have something other than the common cold to fall back on.
Re:How to detonate it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm curious as to why Matter + Antimatter = Ene (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, there's that other part of matter called mass. There's the rest mass of a particle (the particle has NO kinetic energy). And there's the mass associated with velocity (E=mc^2 comes from this... Kinetec Energy = 1/2 * m * v^2).
All the stuff that makes up the particles mass has an equivalent energy via E=mc^2. When you bring a particle and an anti-particle close enough that they react with each other, then the net charge of the two becomes neutral and the mass becomes so great that the new mass wants to find a more stable state. In order for the new mass to find a more stable state, it has to decay. (Now, the mass doesn't "know" or "think" about this, there are physical limits to the amount of mass that you can put into one particle.)
Since the super-particle isn't stable, it breaks up into smaller particles. It just so happens that when you bring an electron and a positron (anti-electron) just close enough that they barely touch with no excess kinetic energy beyond what is needed to make them react, then you'll get a super-particle that instantly decays into two high energy photons (gamma rays).
Laptop Hours, a more useful unit of conversion (Score:5, Interesting)
I would expect that it's on the order of centuries which would make it very desireable, although having a potentially leaking anti-matter device on one's lap would make it very undesireable.
myke
Re:Weapon research == Power plant research. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure that if the radiation exposure isn't enough to kill you, the chemical toxicity of Plutonium would be.
Re:How about research them... (Score:4, Interesting)
During WWII we found that the standard-issue rifle round (.30-06 at the time) was a lot more powerful than it needed to be. Going into the war, they expected infantrymen to be able to conduct aimed fire out to 600 - 1000 yards, so they adopted a rifle (M-1) and cartidge which was effective at these ranges. However, once they actually looked at real-world performance they found that soldiers were doing very little aimed fire and that most targets more than 250 yards away were engaged with heavy weapons.
In keeping with these findings, they redesigned the primary infantry weapon to have a less powerful cartridge that had full-auto capability to provide suppressive fire vs aimed fire. A smaller cartridge means that an infantryman can carry more rounds for the same weight. This gave us the M-14. The problem with the M-14 was that it was still too powerful for an average soldier to fire it on full auto. So, they went to an even lighter rifle & cartidge and got the M-16.
Re:Why, cause nuclear bombs aren't sCary enough? (Score:5, Interesting)
It might very well be more scary, and not just from a power perspective... assume something as big as a nuke, but as (nearly) clean as a conventional explosive. The temptation to use it might be greater, the inhibitions even less.
BTW, anyone want to speculate on H/anti-H bombs? No neutrons to shoot all over the place, but at least a few protons (I'm assuming less than 100% perfect mix). And what happens when an anti-H atom hits oxygen or nitrogen, how does that work exactly?
Harvesting antimatter? (Score:3, Interesting)
But what about harvesting antimatter? Isn't it present in cosmic rays and radiation? A large electromagnetic bubble could be used to filter out antiprotons and slow it down until it is united with positrons in a trap and stored. Since you're working in a hard vacuum, containment is less of an issue and your fields and machinery do not need to be sealed tight. It's just a variation of a bussard ramscoop. Of course it would have to be very large.
Generating antimatter requires massive amounts of energy. So why not go to the most naturally energetic object around - the Sun? Either make a factory designed to operate in close proximity to the sun and use the energy to make antimatter directly, or attempt to capture the naturally generated antimatter from the sun [nasa.gov] in some fashion. I am not an expert, but I presume at least some of the solar wind and certainly some of the solar atmosphere is composed of antimatter.
Re:Why, cause nuclear bombs aren't sCary enough? (Score:2, Interesting)
How is obliterating a country with two or three of these babies any different that obliterating a country with tens of thousand of 500 lb bombs like we did to Germany in WWII? The net effect is the same. The only really scary thing about nukes was the effects of radiation.
We've forgotten what war is supposed to be. It's supposed to be brutal, ugly, horrible, and something we don't want to do on a regular basis. But war is also supposed to be a process by which we destroy stuff and kill people.
Plutonium (Score:5, Interesting)
When the plutonium core of the Trinity device was delivered to the site, the commander insisted that the courier open the case containing it - he said something along the lines of "I won't sign for anything unless I have actually seen it".
So, the courier opened the case, the BC took the sphere out, held it briefly (noting the warmth and "feeling of potential"), then returned it and signed for it.
Go read "The Day The Sun Rose Twice" for the details.
Re:Anti-Matter Resch. (Score:2, Interesting)
Pretty darned spectacular if you ask me... (Score:5, Interesting)
But you have to think about what's doing the holding up. In this case, it wouldn't be steam, it would be radiation pressure keeping the atmosphere from rushing in and annihilating. The actual momentum carried by gamma ray photons from the annihilation would deflect air molecules out of the way to prevent a rapid inrush.
You can calculate how much power that is per square centimeter of "exposed" antimatter.
Each photon carries a certain amount of momentum, momentum per unit time is force. So to sustain a certain pressure a certain number of photons have to be absorbed by the air per square centimeter.
The momentum carried by a photon is just E/c, where E is its energy and c is the speed of light. So to hold out 15 psi (10 Newtons per cm^2), you have to transmit 10^9 Newton-meters/second of power through that square centimeter.
So a golf ball of antimatter, sitting in the atmosphere, would emit about 4*pi*10^9 Watts, or about 10^10 Watts. The surface of the golf ball would be 10^11 times brighter than the surface of the Sun -- though of course most of that radiation would be in the form of gamma rays.
If the golf ball massed about 5 grams, it would
release 5x10^15 Joules in total, so it would indeed last a long time -- but you wouldn't want to classify it as a gentle sizzle...
You could do much better by applying more pressure to the golf ball. Putting it in the imploding shock wave of a thermonuclear bomb trigger could increase the output by something like eight orders of magnitude if you got lucky enough (it scales linearly with pressure).
Re:This is only a small part of weapons research. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think that 3 million deaths over 60 years makes the US government the worst in history, you should go back to the history books.
In African history, there were plenty of times when 3 million over 60 years would pale in comparison. Then, look into the colonial period of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium. Between the numbers of natives murdered, worked to death, killed by disease, and the slaves brought in to replace them, 3 million over 60 years wouldn't look so bad at all. In fact, one particularly dark period of Belgian rule in the Congo brought about 10 million deaths over 40 years.
Germany, of course, slaughtered far more than 3 million (perhaps as high as 11 million) during WW2. The Russian gulag system would rival the 3 million mark, and that was perpetrated against it's own citizens.
I'm not in any way taking any side on any part - American or otherwise. I'm just saying that your statement of the US government being the worst in the history of the world would take an awfully skewed, narrow viewpoint to accept.
steve
Re:Weapon research == Power plant research. (Score:5, Interesting)
This guy [tripod.com] became the "first peacetime atom bomb" fatality by dropping a brick on a ball of plutonium.
Re:Energy Conversion (Score:3, Interesting)
And several conservation laws of physics, as well.
That being said, antimatter may just be a battery, but it is the best possible batter known to very, very basic physics (i.e. it's very unlikely to find a better one). Antimatter would be a very viable fuel for a lightweight probe to other star systems. A few have been proposed - I don't think anyone's taken them seriously, though. (AimSTAR is the one I knew of from a professor at Penn State, though it was definitely a pipe dream.)
Re:Energy Conversion (Score:2, Interesting)
Like anything else, there are inefficiencies which occure (e.g. energy is taken up by re-forming certain elements/compounds etc).
If I recall correctly the absolute most efficient energy conversion process is achieved by a black hole (ask me not the process by which this is done), with a conversion of mass to energy of something like 40% efficiency.
Matter-antimatter isn't anywhere near that.
Again, this is just a heads up
Re:Anti-Matter Resch. (Score:5, Interesting)
E = 2mc^2
E = h*frequency
Frequency of the photon = 2 m*c*c/h
where m = mass of electron c = speed of light
h = planck constant
Now according to google
m = 9.109*10^-31 c= 3*10^8 h = 6.63 *10-34
frequency comes out to be 2.47*10^20 hertz
which comes under gamma rays.
So indeed the positron+electron will produce gamma rays
Re:Plutonium (Score:5, Interesting)
Harry's right hand http://www.nmol.com/users/billp/daghlian.jpg [nmol.com]
Re:How about research them...Big Wrong!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, Big Wrong here. The M14 fires the .308 (7.62 x 51mm) cartridge, which provides virtually identical ballistics to the .30-06 (7.62 x 61mm) round in the M-1. All the .308 proved was that you could put a .30-06 into a case about a half inch shorter.
It was from that mis-step that we went to the 5.56 (.223) cartridge in the M-16 that wasn't even initially intended for the U.S. Army. We were giving AR-15 (civilian model of the M16) to our more slightly statured (shorter & lighter) South Vietmese allies when some one realized that a heavy rifle with heavy ammunition that nobody could control on full-auto fire didn't make nearly as much sense in the jungle where visibility was often 15 yards or less, as did this toy rifle we were giving to everyone else.
As a result, the M16 and its derivations have now served for as long as any other service rifle in the U.S. Military.
And btw, it was the Germans back in 1941-1942 who realized that it didn't make sense for their soliders to carry 1000 metre rifles when most battles were fought at under 400 metres. A smaller, lighter, cheaper rifle with ammunition only effective out to 400 metres that allowed selective fire as well made the individual foot solider a much more effective fighter. Too bad that the USA had to learn that lesson TWICE!! (M14, before M16.)
How Far Are They? Review Post Grad Theses! (Score:1, Interesting)
At the time - and I suppose now - about the only source of anti-matter were nuclear accelerators. The speaker stepped through some concept drawings for filtering, capturing, and storing the good stuff, and how to play with it once enough had been collected to be worthwhile.
What stands out in my memory was the number of times he paused to comment "this would make a good post-grad/post-doc project". So, unless the AF has one hell of an accelerator stashed away that's somehow optimized for anti-particle creation, any practical work will have been in conjunction with the few existing big accelerators. Do some thesis doc searches with references to Fermilab, Livermore, and magnetic
bottles, and you'd have a start.
Something for the tinfoil hat people to keep in mind is that as it stands now, it takes a LOT of energy to produce enough anti-particles that would so much as sterilize a carton of milk, nevermind launch us to Pluto or send China on a Flying Leap Backward.
Re:Weapon research == Power plant research. (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a film called "Fat Man and Little Boy" [imdb.com] which included this very incident.
The guy who died of overexposure was played by John Cusack.
Re:Plutonium (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is only a small part of weapons research. (Score:2, Interesting)
3 million people die every single day for no reason what so ever.
Who gives a fuck about 3 million people? There are 6 billion on this planet, and thats looking to double every 25 years. What is the bigger problem here? 3 million deaths? Or 100 billion new lives?
I so tired of the ridiculous value judgement that death = bad, life = good.
We are on the verge of destroying the world. Its not because of some vast conspiracy. Its because everyone on this planet wants to keep fucking and having lots of children. Maybe if 10 million died every day, we could prevent this planet from turning into one gigantic apartment complex.
Re:Not as spectacular as you think. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Plutonium (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it is Harry Dahlian [tripod.com] for those who want to learn more about it.
Re:Plutonium (Score:2, Interesting)
agree (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure I'm opposed to basic research into antimatter, though. I just wish that it didn't have to be classified six ways 'till Sunday.
I have a feeling that this will serve to keep interested physicists destracted from much simpler uranium enrichment.
Re:Plutonium (Score:3, Interesting)
It is not very popular amongst divers...
I know this guy smith (Score:2, Interesting)
First: yes, as the article states, Gerald Smith was the department chair. However, he didn't stay there very long because he was a jerk.
Second: I'm much more likely to get hit by a falling safe than an anti-matter bomb. This shit is almost impossible to hold. They've been trying for years just to get enough of it so they can make an anti-hydrogen atom stable enough to see if it accelerates like a hydrogen atom under the influence of gravity. If they can't get 1, how are they going to 10^14 (i.e., 1 billionth of a gram)? And even if they make it, how are they going to store it, move it, use it? Hell, just the cryogenics alone make it non-storable. (Yes, this stuff has to stay cool, or the incredibly difficult job of storing it becomes impossible.) Oh, and if somebody says "positronium" instead of "anti-hydrogen", I say, "even harder". After all, anti-hydrogen has been made (if only incredibly briefly).
The original inspiration for making and storing anti-hydrogen was space travel, where the value would make up for the pain. Making another boom just doesn't cut it. What we have here is a scientist in need of funding, together with a bunch of schmucks without any common sense.
Steve Beach, MS in particle astrophysics, 2003.
Re:fantasy and unimaginable budget plans (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not sure where this idea comes from, but it's been referred to in several other posts.
You seem to be making the assumption that the anti-matter will be in the form a singular solid mass. Why? I would think that a fluid of some sort would be more likely (gas, liquid, plasma, cloud of positrons.) It seems very unlikely that you would have a solid spherical mass of anti-Carbon with minimal surface area (for instance.)
rho