Can Antimatter Be Generated in a Lab? (popularmechanics.com) 83
"An international team of physicists have come up with a way to generate antimatter in the lab," reports Popular Mechanics, theoretically "allowing them to recreate conditions that are similar to those near a neutron star."
This setup, at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) research laboratory in Germany, involves two high-intensity laser beams that can generate a jet of antimatter, as outlined in a paper published earlier this summer in the journal Communications Physics. That could make antimatter-based research far more accessible for scientists around the world...
it's tremendously difficult to recreate a neutron star's extreme conditions in terms of the science and logistics — imagine if a sugar cube weighed as much as Mount Everest in your laboratory! Two, scientists want to make antimatter for further analysis in the lab... So how did the researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf figure out how to generate antimatter? They're using opposing lasers in a setup they're referring to as a laser pincer... There's a tiny piece of plastic that both lasers shoot toward. As the lasers destroy the plastic, they send clouds of electrons toward each other... By smashing particles together between two lasers, scientists can begin to approach the intensely concentrated gravity and matter of a neutron star...
In this case, scientists are still speculating that the laser pincers will work, with support from a computer simulation that has helped them test and confirm their theory. Now, the next step is to begin building the rig that will really fire the lasers. "[C]olleagues are developing a platform that can be used to experimentally test whether the magnetic fields actually form as our simulations predict," HZDR physicist Toma Toncian says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Third Position for submitting the article!
it's tremendously difficult to recreate a neutron star's extreme conditions in terms of the science and logistics — imagine if a sugar cube weighed as much as Mount Everest in your laboratory! Two, scientists want to make antimatter for further analysis in the lab... So how did the researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf figure out how to generate antimatter? They're using opposing lasers in a setup they're referring to as a laser pincer... There's a tiny piece of plastic that both lasers shoot toward. As the lasers destroy the plastic, they send clouds of electrons toward each other... By smashing particles together between two lasers, scientists can begin to approach the intensely concentrated gravity and matter of a neutron star...
In this case, scientists are still speculating that the laser pincers will work, with support from a computer simulation that has helped them test and confirm their theory. Now, the next step is to begin building the rig that will really fire the lasers. "[C]olleagues are developing a platform that can be used to experimentally test whether the magnetic fields actually form as our simulations predict," HZDR physicist Toma Toncian says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Third Position for submitting the article!
Yes. (Score:2)
Since like 1955.
Re: (Score:2)
It's frustrating that I can't find the one number I care about: positron generation efficiency (in either the article or the paper), even relative to laser energy, let alone wall plug efficiency.
Also, this is not "in a lab", it's in a high energy laser facility.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you have a distinction without a difference.
I promise I'm not a scientist (Score:2)
Re: I promise I'm not a scientist (Score:3)
Is that because you get your fears from speculative movies written by non-scientists instead of scientific journals and evidence-based logic?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I promise I'm not a scientist (Score:5, Interesting)
This sounds like it could go very, very wrong.
If you took all the anti-matter that humanity has ever created and converted it all into pure energy, you would barely have enough to heat a cup of tea.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Now they think they've come up with a way to create it fairly easily, assuming the simulations are correct. Moderation is key. Drinking a glass of water won't kill you. Drinking gallons will.
It does not take gallons of water to kill a person. All they have to do is drink ONE gallon in a very short period of time. Chug it. And they are in extreme danger, especially if they are already impaired or don't realize the danger. Innocent people competing in water-chugging contests have died from it.
There was an infamous case when the Wii game console launched and was hard to obtain where a mom with kids entered a water-chugging contest with the Wii being the prize for the winner. It was a urine jo
Re: (Score:2)
Notably there was a bit of medical mis-adventure involved as well. Here kidneys all but shut down in a somewhat rare over-reaction to nausea and she absorbed all of the water in part because of a strong ability to resist nausea.
Without the reaction, or if she had gone ahead and vomited, she would have been OK.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not really much of a worry. Necessarily, the total energy released from the positrons annihilating with electrons cannot exceed the energy input into the system in the first place. You'll want some shielding from the generated gamma, but that's true of any gamma source.
Re: (Score:2)
If you took all the anti-matter that humanity has ever created and converted it all into pure energy, you would barely have enough to heat a cup of tea.
Yes, but how big would a pile of bananas need to be to generate that much energy through radioactive decay in a fortnight? Not everyone understands what a cup of tea is like.
Re:I promise I'm not a scientist (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but how big would a pile of bananas need to be to generate that much energy through radioactive decay in a fortnight?
A cup of tea is 250 grams and is warmed from 20C to 100C. So that is 250*80 = 2000 calories = 8370 joules.
The anti-matter emited by K-40 in a banana produces 9e-18 watts of power [wired.com].
A fortnight is 14*24*3600 = 1209600 seconds.
So you would need 8370 / (9e-18 * 1209600) = 768,849,206,349,206 bananas.
Re: (Score:3)
768,849,206,349,206 bananas
Well then, it seems like converting relatable units to arcane ones is your cup of tea.
Re: (Score:2)
I love /. for this very reason -- thank you for doing that math!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Careful, I'm fairly sure that shifting a lady's undergarments 3 feet to the left at the office party (however unsuccessful) is now considered sexual harassment.
Heart of Gold vending inc. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
This sounds like it could go very, very wrong.
If you took all the anti-matter that humanity has ever created and converted it all into pure energy, you would barely have enough to heat a cup of tea.
What about something "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea?"
barely have enough to heat a cup of tea. (Score:2)
a cup of cold tea
without milk or sugar
or tea
Re: (Score:2)
Keep your safety glasses on, those are real lasers!
Also, splattering burnt plastic. Probably smells awful in that lab.
Re:If we want to destroy the earth (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not try to create a tiny black hole see how long it takes to consume the world?
We know of no possible way to create tiny black holes, but even if we did, making a black hole with a lifetime of more than a second would require far more energy than humanity has harnessed since the beginning of civilization.
Re: (Score:2)
We know of no possible way to create tiny black holes
No feasible way yes, but we do know of a straightforward way [wikipedia.org] to make them that no physicist would really question on principle because it’s so simple and well understood. It would just require an impracticality large spherical array in space that we wouldn’t be able to construct for the foreseeable future, but the benefit is it would be able to pump out miniature black holes.
Re: (Score:3)
You're assuming that a black hole can actually evaporate away to nothing. If it did, it would leave behind a naked singularity. Alternatively, it may be that there's a minimum size to a black hole that radiates, in which case it couldn't get any smaller. Of course, at that size its capture cross-section would be so small that it also couldn't swallow anything, so all that would be left would a a minuscule gravity field, and a bit of angular momentum.
I'm not an expert in the field, but that's my guess as
Re: (Score:3)
If dark matter was primordial black holes, we would see evidence of that, such as gravitational lensing.
Also, if tiny BHs are possible, and we see many BHs more than 3.3 solar masses, then how do you explain that there is nothing in between? Why do we never see a BH or one or two or half a solar mass?
Re: If we want to destroy the earth (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it's an independent line of evidence. But in order of discovery, Vera Rubin's mid-70s discovery of the non-Keplerian rotation speeds of galaxy discs clearly has priority. Finding gravitational lenses (of quasars, with their irregular flickering and spectral detail) came a number of years later, as pairs. Then, probably in the late 80s or early 90s (I wasn't keeping notes) astronomers started finding quasar triples and hi
Re: (Score:3)
Isn't gravitational lensing one of the primary pieces of evidence for dark matter?
It is, but not all lensing events are the same. You are referring to lensing events that allow us to detect large amounts of dark matter at great distances. The non-existent lensing events are very different, they are what individual black holes nearby would generate. We don't see those, which excludes black holes above some specific mass as a major component of DM. Smaller ones could still be candidates.
Re: (Score:2)
The black holes I'm talking about would have evaporated until they were too small to swallow an electron or a photon. So seeing individual instances would be extremely difficult.
FWIW, I believe I've recently read a report of a black hole less than 3 solar masses in size, but they needed to look in a particular wavelength to see it. Even so it was very dim, so such things wouldn't expect to be seen very often. But that's not the kind I was talking about anyway. The kind I was talking about would have bee
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure that is possible.
Certainly, electrons have a rest mass, so their wave function has a maximum wavelength representing that mass. But if it is travelling (any speed, but let's say relativisically) it has more energy, so a smaller wave function size. And that goes all the way down. Eventually, for a very small BH it might only be able to ingest the occasional passing gamma ray phot
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I'm not sure it's possible either. But I don't like the idea of naked singularities, either, and those seem to be the choices, unless you rule out that black holes can evaporate.
Of course, whether I like something or not has no bearing on whether it's true, but in the absence of significant evidence it affects what I "sort of" believe (i.e., believe with very low certainty).
Re: (Score:2)
Neither do the several other cosmologists who have proposed various forms of "Cosmic Censorship Principle [wikipedia.org]".
Of course, the universe is not bound to consider the preferences - or even the existence - of meatsacks on a mudball.
Re: (Score:2)
Primordial black holes of dust to atomic mass, so that a statistically even few hundred or few thousand exist in your telescope's beam to a light source wouldn't be detectable this way.
Re: (Score:2)
Primordial black holes are still in the running for dark matter, but they must be in a specific size range, and there is no accepted mechanism for their possible formation. Super symmetry theorists have proposed at least one though, so maybe it is PBHs and super symmetry is a thing (string theory, not so much, still).
Since the nature of dark matter is still up for grabs (after eliminating a bunch of candidates) complaining that a known possible cause still on the table lacks a mechanism of formation is not
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:If we want to destroy the earth (Score:4, Insightful)
In any case, the LHC is already generating antimatter. Generation is not the issue. It is storage. Keeping it away from the pro matter that will instantly combine and annihilate
Re: (Score:2)
When fission was tested in New Mexico, no one knew for sure that chain reaction would not destroy the planet.
FYI, that's a myth:
https://blogs.scientificameric... [scientificamerican.com]
Horgan: I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the story of Teller's suggestion that the atomic bomb might ignite the atmosphere around the Earth.
Bethe: It is such absolute nonsense [laughter], and the public has been interested in it And possibly it would be good to kill it once more. (goes on to try to kill it, but apparently the myth will never die)
Long story short, they did seriously investigate the possibility, but determined it would be impossible. There was no doubt at all among the scientific team at the time of the weapons test.
Chalk up the infamous bet to macabre humor by a rather quirky physicist.
Re: (Score:2)
There was a scifi story that takes place on Mars, where astronauts discover an ancient alien outpost powered by a nearly point source...something. One of the astronauts turns it off. The "something" was a tiny piece of neutron star (or maybe a tiny black hole), and releasing it caused it to fall through Mars' core and to the other side, then back and forth, eating up a little bit of Mars with each pass. The scientists debate how long it will take for Mars to disappear.
I just spent way too much time tryin
Re: (Score:2)
Larry Niven, "The Hole Man"
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So it eventually became it doesn't matter?
Yes (Score:2)
Can Antimatter Be Generated in a Lab? Yes... (Score:3)
...but you need to first create an anti-lab.
Re:Can Antimatter Be Generated in a Lab? Yes... (Score:4, Funny)
I believe that's called a chihuahua.
High % Conversion Matter to Energy (Score:2)
Even if they get some piddling % efficiency it should be way in the black with regards to energy in and energy out.
I'd suggest watch this space!
Ask slashdot (Score:3)
A great question to ask on slashdot, I'm sure all the Nobel prize winners and eminent physicists in our community will provide the correct answer.
As described, not new (Score:5, Interesting)
This experiment is generating positrons from photon-photon collisions, but even that isn't new, SLAC experiment E-144 https://www.slac.stanford.edu/... [stanford.edu] did that in the late 90s.
This experiment isn't using accelerators, but that there are positron emitting isotopes that can be used in any lab and don't need accelerators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
BTW - I'm listing SLAC experiments because I'm familiar with the, but I don't know if any of them were the first demonstration of their kind and I am not claiming that they are
The extremely high optical fields they are generating may be unique and it may be a new mechanism for generating positrons -I'd need to read very carefully to be sure. ELI does very good work - it just bugs me when articles like the above imply something far more extrordinary than actually happened. Science moves in lots of small steps
Not happened either (Score:2)
"scientists are still speculating that the laser pincers will work"
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
And the original scientific paper has absolutely nothing to do with neutron stars (except for a single bibliographical reference in the introduction). Typical pseudo-journalist sensationalism.
Re: As described, not new (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And Nature has been doing it since time immemorial.
The discovery of positrons in 1935(+/-) was from a cosmic ray impact in a balloon-born cloud chamber surrounded by a magnet, where (IIRC) an incoming proton (one sense of curvature, one mass, one radius of curvature) entered the within-chamber plate, and kicked out a particle which travelled with the curvature radius appropriate to an electron's mass-charge ratio, but the same curvature sense as the incoming proton. He
Yes, it can (Score:5, Interesting)
It's fairly trivial to generate positrons (antielectrons) in the lab by radioactive decay of carbon-11, potassium-40,nitrogen-13, oxygen-15, aluminium-26, sodium-22, fluorine-18, or iodine-121. The last time I looked United Nuclear had a sodium positron source as a stock item.
Trekkie (Score:2)
Better start looking for dilithium crystals.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Creating antimatter is easy. Not trivial, but easy (Score:2)
Containing it, isolating it, IIRC is the bigger challenge.
Re: (Score:1)
Separating it is easy though. In a magnetic field, always flies off in the opposite direction from normal matter.
After that, you can just treat it like normal matter with an opposite polarity that isn't allowed to touch any (normal matter) walls. Again, magnets are your friend here.
If you get it to form actual atoms and molecules, it gets really easy to handle, As easy as keeping a ball of some stuff hovering somewhere.
Of course implying you put it underground to protect it from cosmic rays.
Making it in big
Yes, of course. (Score:2)
Creating anti-matter has been rather routine for about half a century. What kind of an idiotic post is this?
Why did you put the headline in question form? (Score:1)
The submission wasn't. Because everybody here knows it can and was.
And the story wasn't about that, but about making it in nice large quantities.
And about how the principle is really nice and elegant and how it should be. (If you want anti-matter, you need to start with light, and let it split into matter and anti-matter. You put a lot of energy in, because merging it again will give you a *lot* of energy back. Nukes are a joke compared to matter-antimatter-"annihilation".)
Virginia Coalition (Score:2)
If you meet someone from another planet and he holds out his left hand, don’t shake it. He might be made of antimatter. You would both disappear in a tremendous flash of light.
Re: (Score:2)
The alien would have to be in a vacuum. otherwise the atmosphere would be reacting before you got to touch
Re: (Score:2)
See also : nose rubbing, penis shaking and other greeting rituals used by anatomically modern human males.
Easy way to get antimatter in your garage (Score:3)
There's a very easy way to generate antimatter in your garage, basement or backyard. Heck, many people are probably doing it already without knowing it.
Go to Home Depot and buy a bag of potassium chloride water softener. Put it in your garage. There, you have antimatter. On a small scale you can do the same by buying at a grocery store a box of low sodium salt substitute, which also has potassium chloride in it.
If you don't believe me, take a Geiger counter and put it next to the bag of potassium chloride, and enjoy its clicking. I get around 60cpm, which is around 4 times the natural background in my location. Those are 511keV gamma rays resulting from the annihilation of positrons emitted by the K-40 isotope, which is a small but universal percentage of potassium anywhere in the universe.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well played, sir. Well played.
Duplicating NIF? (Score:2)
Editor scientifically illiterate or just trolling? (Score:2)
Looks like trolling.
So... (Score:2)