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?"
obvious question (Score:5, Funny)
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?"
Maybe in a Star Trek convention...
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Hey, don't knock it. If the lowly budget of a star trek convention can afford to have anti-matter reactors lying around, then we all can!
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I think the Romulans will beat the Vulcans; the Federation uses antimatter, the Romulan warbirds are powered by black holes. The LHC will be online before they even start building the antimatter accellerator.
I'm amused at what the press is going to be saying when the thing is nearing completion. They worried about Earth being swallowed by mini-black holes generated by the LHC, they'll probably have "Oh noes, antimatter! The whole solar system will blow up!!!" with the antimatter accelerators.
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ZOMG (Score:2, Funny)
Keptin, I'm giving you all she's got!
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Don't you think that should be her decision, Scotty?
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Hahhah, right. I thought Scotty's accent had changed :D
Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
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?"
Actually, I think the next question would be: "Now how can get some antimatter?"
It's my understanding that we can only manufacture ridiculously minute quantities of the stuff, and that may take more energy to make than we'll get out of it anyways.
Re:Wrong Question (Score:4, Insightful)
antimatter is like molecular hydrogen as a fuel for fuel cells. It's more of a storage device of energy than it is a a way to "produce" energy.
At this point it's terribly inefficient, but theoretically, it could be a viable means of taking an enormous amount of energy and storing it in a small place. :-)
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hydrogen:antimatter::refrigerator:electromagnet
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Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Funny)
The same effect can be achieved with a swift kick to the nuts.
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It's not obvious that the total energy density when you factor in the containment etc. will actually be all that great. Certainly you'd have to have a project which needed some absolutely mind-blowing energy density requirements to justify the cost.
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I think the next question would be: "Now how can get some antimatter?"
It's my understanding that we can only manufacture ridiculously minute quantities of the stuff, and that may take more energy to make than we'll get out of it anyways.
It WILL take more energy than we can get out of it. They have to make the positrons first before destroying them.
The point of this is to see how the particles behave to validate or disprove current theories. This isn't being done to make an unlimited source of energy.
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Re:Wrong Question (Score:4, Informative)
If you call hundreds of billions [cosmosmagazine.com] ridiculously minute, then maybe.
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ask for a bulk discount.
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Try ebay.
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But make sure to check the seller's rating first.
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Negative review: Seller packaged the item poorly and the containment battery seems to be damag@!%!#&^* .... NO CARRIER
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So, can 225 microcents get you 3.9 micrograms of TNT then, or is this uneconomical?
Re:Wrong Question - PET (Score:2, Informative)
As preparation for the PET scan you were given an injection with a radioactive tracer which decays via positron emission. The PET scanner doesn't generate any radiation, it simply detects the 511 keV gamma rays produced when the positrons in the tracer annihilate with an electron.
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Informative)
But quotes for the "free market cost of antimatter" are based on the fantastic costs of generating it in an accelerator. The reason being that radioactive decay is suitable for producing positrons that emit from a substance (in every direction), but is not a viable way of capturing said positrons and using them for anything else. An accelerator, instead, can generate anti-particles and capture them (e.g. using magnetic fields) and "keep" them somewhere (e.g. in a storage ring). Also worth noting is that accelerators can create not just positrons (anti-electrons) but also anti-protons, and even "true antimatter" such as anti-hydrogen (positrons + anti-protons), albeit for a very, very short time.
So depending what kind of antimatter you want, where you need it, and whether or not you need is stored, the price can vary. But all known methods for producing any sort of antimatter require significant input of effort and energy, and are correspondingly expensive.
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Informative)
Oh yeah, I love that news wire article.. it was repeated dozens of times in different magazines and news papers. Unfortunately, no-one has bothered to actually track down a reference to a scholarly publication for it. In fact, there is none, the technique was presented at a conference and no-one has reproduced it.. there's no papers quantifying exactly how much antimatter was made and at what temperatures.
Re:Wrong Question (Score:4, Informative)
Hundreds of billions still ain't a lot when you're talking about nucleons for use as a fuel. When you annihilate it you should get about ten joules, or enough to raise the temperature of a tiny drop of water by a couple of degrees.
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When you annihilate it you should get about three to the minus ten joules
Fixed that for you. Protons have a mass of 1.7E-27 kg, c = 3E8 m/s, so 2*mc**2 ~ 3E-10 (the factor of two from the anti-proton).
The article itself is clearly written for an audience of ignorant yobs, and that's fair enough: ignorant yobs need a gateway into the scientific world as much as anyone. But it ain't "news for nerds", because nerds know that matter-anti-matter colliders have been around for decades.
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Half the mass already existed, half of it was created with energy input, all of it is burned, assuming equal mass and ignoring practical inefficiencies E(out) = 2xE(in).
This assumes that there is a way to make antimatter without producing a corresponding ammount of matter at the same time. I was under the impression that all known ways of making antimatter produced pairs of corresponding matter and antimatter particles.
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1 ml of air (or any other gas) at ambient conditions contains about 2.69e18 (in other words almost 3 quintillion) molecules. A hundred billions is 1e14, or 26900 times less.
Also take note that antimatter was produced in the form of positrons. A positron is more than 50000 times lighter than a molecule of nitrogen. So the reported experiment produced 1/1382498600 of the mass of a milliliter of air. And a milliliter of air weighs about 1.3 mg.
(Of course air also contains other gases than nitrogen but I'm simp
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Depends on what you're counting. Hundreds of billions of elephants isn't very minute, but hundreds of billions of electrons are.
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This is my point. Ridiculously minute is a relative thing here. Sure, 100 billion is a big number. Sure, Avogadro's number is a LOT bigger. However, I don't imagine they'd be needing quite that many particles for what they're doing. But really, I don't know. I'm not a physicist, I'm just speculating. 100 billion seems like a lot of particles to be smashing together in a linear accelerator, though.
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Not according to Dan Brown [wikipedia.org].
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Now how do we find the crystals in a different star system without having the warp drive to get to that different star system... hmmmmmm
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Dilithium is just two lithium molecules which would be a squishy soft metal that is reactive with water.
Not much of a "magic antimatter control device" happening there.
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"may" ?
Perpetum mobile isn't invensted, and won't be anytime soon. First creating, then using antimatter is always going to give you back less than what you started with.
Current production-methods aren't just giving "less" they're giving MANY orders of magnitude less. It's a question of using hundreds of megajoules, and get a few joules back. CERN can produce 10^7 atoms of anti-hydrogen a second, for example, this sounds like a lot, but at that rate it'd take them 2 billion years to produce a single gram.
Of
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Anything that produces more energy than it expends is a non-renewable resource. The energy came from somewhere. Ultimately, it was from the sun.
So... the only real "renewable" energy in a civilization-scale, is fusion (likely only solar fusion), which limits us.
Any other technology we come up with are merely creative means of "storing" energy, or releasing stored energy (as is the case with fossil fuels).
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It's my understanding that we can only manufacture ridiculously minute quantities of the stuff, and that may take more energy to make than we'll get out of it anyways.
Given that entropy is always staying the same or increasing, yes it most probably will take more energy to create that antimatter than what we get out of it.
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"and that may take more energy to make than we'll get out of it anyways."
Fortunately the law of energy conservation still applies in Slashdot
Re:Wrong Question (Score:5, Funny)
Easy. We can has anticheezeburger. Can removes cheezeburger, put in matter.
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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 somethi
Matter / anti matter reactor is not enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, a matter/anti matter reactor is not enough to create an Alcubierre drive.. We still need some Exotic Matter.. And a lot of it..
So .. go back to sleep.. nothing to see here..
--Ivan
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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
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This isn't a reactor, it's a research collider. As you point out, antimatter engines are way off and warp drive itself is, in practical terms, still a load of bollocks. It's not even clear that an Alcubierre drive could operate at FTL: certainly naturally-existing warpings of space and time (gravity) have never been seen to break relativity.
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Unfortunately, a matter/anti matter reactor is not enough to create an Alcubierre drive
Hell the reaction that they are carrying out yields in the best of times about 500 KeV * 2 (two, due to laws about linear momentum and energy) per reaction. Say we have about million reactions (a million electrons annihilating a million positrons) That only yields somewhere around 7 to 8 x 10^-8 joules * 2 of energy. Hell, I can't even remember what the resulting particle would be in this case so I'm going to just guess it is a photon, really high energy photon so I'm guessing a gamma ray.
Point being t
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Unfortunately, a matter/anti matter reactor is not enough to create an Alcubierre drive.. We still need some Exotic Matter.. And a lot of it..
Actually, there's a modification to the original version that requires only a few milligrams of exotic matter [wikipedia.org]. Of course, that's still infinitely more than we currently know how to make....
P.S.: Props to whoever named the footnote anchors on that page after Star Trek captains.
Duh! (Score:5, Informative)
There's a matter-antimatter collider in production since the 1990's. It's called the Tevatron, it collides protons with antiprotons and it is in Illinois.
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There's a matter-antimatter collider in production since the 1990's. It's called the Tevatron, it collides protons with antiprotons and it is in Illinois.
And this one is bigger and more powerful. Lets just hope it doesn't come with a 'Designed for windows 7' sticker on the side though.
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There's a matter-antimatter collider in production since the 1990's. It's called the Tevatron, it collides protons with antiprotons and it is in Illinois.
And this one is bigger and more powerful. Lets just hope it doesn't come with a 'Designed for windows 7' sticker on the side though.
Actually, not really. Neither future linear colliders are expected to have collisions with more than a factor of 2 to 3 more energy than the Tevatron.
How is that not more powerful?
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There's a matter-antimatter collider in production since the 1990's. It's called the Tevatron, it collides protons with antiprotons and it is in Illinois.
And this one is bigger and more powerful. Lets just hope it doesn't come with a 'Designed for windows 7' sticker on the side though.
Actually, not really. Neither future linear colliders are expected to have collisions with more than a factor of 2 to 3 more energy than the Tevatron.
How is this not more powerful?
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I heard that relatively small colliders were likely going to pass the LHC's top energy using a waveform collapsing technique. Or did that turn out to be bogus?
As I understand it (IANAPP) it's not bogus, but it's very difficult to do. It's also much more difficult to use that technique (plasma wakefield acceleration, according to wikipedia) to accelerate antimatter since creating an anti-matter plasma is stupidly difficult anyway, so it's better suited for accelerators that use a stationary target.
Re:Duh! (Score:5, Informative)
Now before somebody says, but the LHC is proton-proton, you suck, the LHC is actually a quark-anti quark or gluon-gluon collider. Protons are not just 3 quarks, due to the strong interaction there is also a sea of gluons and quark-anti quark pairs which carry the momentum of the proton. At the energies of the LHC, this sea becomes important.
The article is terrible and horribly confused. Reads like something from the Sun (a gutter British newspaper for non Brits).
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I imagine you could conceivably have an e- e- collider too, but given that a) the need for a higher order electromagnetic process would suppress the production cross sections considerably and b) positrons are easy to get hold of compared to antiprotons, then there isn't much point.
These fancy new e+ e- colliders are all very well anyway, but I love the idea of a muon collider - gets round the pesky synchrotron radiation losses associated with circular electron colliders like LEP. Downside - muons only live
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Yes, but muons are ~200x heavier than electrons, so the total energy at a given relativistic gamma is 200x larger. Since synchrotron radiation is directly dependent on gamma, not energy or mass, the energy achievable is much larger.
This is why LEP was limited by synchrotron radiation at ~ 200 GeV but the LHC can do 14000 GeV and has small synchrotron radiation losses even at that energy - protons are about 1800 times heavier than electrons.
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Nice explaination, but don't tell your readers they "suck" for not understanding quantum chromodynamics, smartass.
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He's also telling it to readers who innocently carry that misconception in their heads.
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How Depressing (Score:2)
The +/- designs are last gen ^ X, not next gen. If The Register followed the history details closely, a good number of computer startups came from a club that met at SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Yes, the design is that old and older.
As for the 'obvious question', if the supposedly obligatory SF reference comes out sounding like so much shite, leave it out, OK?
Between these two details, TFA could have predated /. by a decade.
Matter-Antimatter isnt new (Score:2, Insightful)
PET Scan (Score:2)
PET scanning uses radioisotope Beta decay to Neutron, Neutrino and Positron, Positron -> Electron annihilation -> Gamma -> detection.
This is using an existing source of positrons, beta radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission [wikipedia.org]
The non-trivial stuff is making anti-atoms. That's quite difficult.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter#Artificial_production [wikipedia.org]
"sneak-peak" (Score:3, Interesting)
Peak: top of a mountain.
And the daily Slashdot malapropism award goes to samzenpus.
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If I'd called him an illiterate moron, that might be justified. But I tried to make the point with a lighter note.
If you don't care about spelling (not "grammar"), that's fine, but it's not debatable, it's just 100% wrong.
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Screw that. You both have horribly spelled nicks.
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Wee owl ewes spill chuckers sew wee no hour spilling is core wrecked.
Many other options right now (Score:2)
There are always many different designs being investigated, even up to fairly advanced stages. This doesn't mean that any of those is going to be build. You have to realize that in order to make decisions that cost several M$, you have to know what you can do and how to achieve it beforehand, in great detail.
CLIC is definitely one of the bigger things currently in investigation. The ILC (lepton machine) is another one. There's also big interest in Neutri
Intergalactic Patents? (Score:2)
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.
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The article's explanation is quite bad -- wakefields aren't really anything to do with twisting and warping "the very fabric of space-time". They're just the electromagnetic energy left behind by the beam as it traverses these cavities.
I think his bell analogy is actually quite good. He goes on to say that damped detuning is much more preferable to strong damping, and it is strong damping that is more like resting a finger on a guitar string. The problem he is trying to solve is that of the entire struct
t that's not damped detuning (Score:2)
This is like a system of resonators all with slightly different peak frequencies which cannot co-excite one another, which is neither damping nor detuning. If you want to see an everyday damped detuning system, look under your car at the engine mounts. Not only do they absorb energy (the rubber is deliberately made with energy-absorbi
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FYI -- I work on this project, and I work with Roger Jones (the guy in the article), so I know a substantial amount about this.
Your definition of damping is quite right, but your definition of detuning is, in this case, not really what he means. What he means is taking a cavity, and changing its shape in order to "detune" some cells.
To explain:
The cavities are traditionally built in such a way that each cell rings (like a bell) at the design frequency of the accelerating rf. Since all of the cells are ide
Vogons clear it for an Intergalactic Highway (Score:2, Insightful)
Matter - Antimatter? (Score:2)
Re:antimatter (Score:5, Funny)
Kind of like your karma points for that comment ;)
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Are you lost?
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Re:antimatter (Score:5, Informative)
I thought it had something to do with time... Like, positrons were electrons going the other way in time, which is why they annihilate when they collide and produce a photon. Really the electron is hitting a photon and turning around in time. Likewise with pair production. Anyone know if this is right? I honestly think that quantum physics book was chock full of lies...
If I remember correctly, that theory comes from Feynman diagrams. It is a pretty interesting theory, and you can get some other very interesting ideas out of it. As with most other aspects of particle physics, how "true" it is can be debated at length, but the mathematics works, which is probably enough for most physicists.
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Here's the basic concept: positive-energy antiparticle travelling forwards in time == negative-energy particle travelling backwards in time. Note that in the 'real' world, only positive energies are possible, so we observe both particles and antiparticles with positive energy.
In a bit more detail:
The expression for the propagation of the particle contains an oscillating exponential term:
exp(-i*E*t)
where E = energy and t = time (hbar is set to 1).
Using the equivalence I mentioned above, both energy and time
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and opposite spin...
For sure! I mean, like they're not really annihilating each other, it's just a game they play. It's for the best anyway.
Anybody remember that poem about when Dr.Edward Teller met Dr.Edward Anti-Teller?
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No.
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Check in LLNL's annual reports, going back to 1944. In none of them will you find a mention by me of knowledge of a poem about Dr. Teller. In fact, if you scour all academic journals, LoC, and wikipedia, you will not find any mention of my knowledge of any poem, outside of J. R. R. Tolkien's Cat [poemhunter.com] . My non-knowledge of poetry about physicists is quite well non-documented.
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and you'll shut up most of the people that are gonna bitch about it blowing up a killing us all
I doubt it. Many of those people seemed like the sort who are noisy regardless of whether or not they really have anything useful to say.