Design Starting For Matter-Antimatter Collider 191
couch_warrior writes "The Register is carrying a story on the early design efforts for the next generation of high-energy particle accelerators. They will be linear, and will collide matter and antimatter in the form of electrons and positrons. The obvious question will be: once we have a matter-antimatter reactor, how long till we have warp drive, and will the Vulcans show up for a sneak-peak?"
Re:Matter / anti matter reactor is not enough (Score:4, Interesting)
ZPMs (Zero Point Modules) still won't cut it..
a ZPM (the SG-1/SGA fictuous device) that's suppose to drain energy from empty space is still a device that (supposedly) gets you free regular energy.. no Exotic matter here.. sorry
--Ivan
Re:Matter / anti matter reactor is not enough (Score:1, Interesting)
What you are looking for is matter with negative mass.
Sadly, this is impossible: Graviton (mediates inertia) and Higgs (mediates mass) particles are their own antiparticles, similar to Photon (mediates electromagnetism). (At least as postulated by current physics)
You therefor cannot have negative mass any more than you can have "Anti-light."
What you MIGHT be able to do is create a condition where Higgs or Graviton particles/waves are naturally disrupted, or self-interfering in such a fashion as to give an object unusual properties. (Like entangling a beam of photons with itself so that it causes beam scattering like in traditional holographic imaging, only with gravitational energy, to produce a "gravity hologram".) But to do that you would need to know MUCH more about the particles/waves in question, which we don't.
Re:Duh! (Score:3, Interesting)
"sneak-peak" (Score:3, Interesting)
Peak: top of a mountain.
And the daily Slashdot malapropism award goes to samzenpus.
Read the Register article (Score:3, Interesting)
It's about wakefields and the possibility of reducing their external effects by detuning. What makes this interesting is that the proposals for next-gen small accelerators are about deliberately using wakefields to achieve very high acceleration over very short ranges, effectively getting particles to surf on laser-induced wakefields.
The guy with the proposal also manages to give a spectacularly bad example of detuning - bells, anyone? - which fully complies with the Bad Analogy requirements, i.e. detuning is nothing at all like having lots of bells, and the analogy doesn't provide any insight at all into what is happening. Detuning is more like resting a finger gently on a vibrating guitar string.
All this article really tells me is that wakefields are very hot in particle accelerator research, and efforts are focussing on reducing their unwanted effects as well as extracting more energy from them.
Re:antimatter (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wrong Question (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always thought the logical solution to space energy needs would be:
1. Built cluster of giant solar-powered accelerators in close solar orbit, say around Mercury
2. Automatically refine positrons and antiprotons into cryogenic antihydrogen
3. Figure out some way of diamagnetic containment using a really strong magnetic field.
4. Ship tanks of the devil's brew to the outer system
5. Mix antihydrogen and real hydrogen to make a crude but energetic brute-force rocket. Maybe 1 part anti-H2 to 1000 H2 or something, so you get enough reaction mass. Otherwise it'll all be just gamma rays. That's just a small matter of engineering, anyway.
6. Explore strange new worlds! Profit from new lifeforms! And if your power supply ever glitches: kablooey! Not much use for lifeboats.
Look it would make space travel EXCITING and that's the important bit, right?
Nothing new; colliders are usually like this! (Score:1, Interesting)
CERN's LHC is notable for being the first collider that doesn't collide antiparticles. Colliding antiparticles is the standard design.
You might remember that the tunnel LHC is using was previously occupied by the LEP collider, which stands for "large electron/positron". The Tevatron also collides protons and antiprotons.
Since protons and antiprotons curve in opposite directions in a magnetic field, it's very convenient to build one set of magnets and use them for `two beams of particles in going in opposite directions.
LHC, as the first proton/proton collider, has a much more complicated magnet design because it needs to generate two different magnetic fields. But the number of particles it needs is so high that it was impractical (and even more expensive) to generate that many antiprotons.