I posted this on my departmental notice board because i was tired of seeing the board empty of tech post and mostly because i was in the mood for writing something " techy " and i feel it is only natural to also post it on this blog as well.
So what exactly is energy? Well as Albert Einstein rightly put it “ energy and matter are different forms of the same thing ”. He was of the opinion that every bit of matter is energy evident in his famous formula ( E = mC2 ). We humans have been able to convert matter into energy ( although very inefficiently and with a lot of losses to a form most common to us – HEAT ), but what about the other way round….
So what exactly is energy? Well as Albert Einstein rightly put it “ energy and matter are different forms of the same thing ”. He was of the opinion that every bit of matter is energy evident in his famous formula ( E = mC2 ). We humans have been able to convert matter into energy ( although very inefficiently and with a lot of losses to a form most common to us – HEAT ), but what about the other way round….
Presenting ANTIMATTER – the wonder particle only
created and captured in small amounts for now using a particle accelerator and
a penning trap ( just a set of magnetic traps, using superconducting magnets
cooled to temperatures near absolute zero – the ALPHA researchers in CERN used
an octupole magnet, produced by the current flowing in eight wires, to create
the magnetic field. The container is lined with such magnet and arranged in
such a way that its magnetic field is strongest close to the wall and weakest
at the center of the container/trap).
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| A positron discovery |
This brings us to another important question, so what
then are antimatter particles? The term antimatter was first introduced by Arthur Schuster in 1898. In his two
letters to Nature, Schuster hypothesized antiatoms, whole antimatter
solar systems and discussed the possibility of matter and antimatter
annihilating each other. The modern theory of antimatter began in 1928, with a
paper by physicist Paul Dirac. In
particle physics, antimatter is an extension of the concept of the antiparticle
to matter. Antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal
matter is composed of particles.
Trapping antimatter is tricky. When matter and
antimatter get too close, they destroy each other, in a kind of explosion,
leaving behind the energy - we could
harness - which made them. The
challenge is cooling the atoms off enough, 272 degrees below zero; so that they
are slow enough to be trapped in a magnetic storage device.
An antihydrogen atom is made from a negatively charged
antiproton and a positively charged positron, the antimatter counterpart of the
electron.
More than 99.9% of the mass of neutral antimatter is
accounted for by antiprotons and antineutrons. Their annihilation with protons
and neutrons is a complicated process. A proton-antiproton pair can annihilate
into a number of charged and neutral relativistic pions. Neutral pions, in
turn, decay almost immediately into gamma rays; charged pions travel a few tens
of meters and then decay further into muons and neutrinos. Finally, the muons
decay into electrons and more neutrinos. Most of the energy (about 60%) is
carried away by neutrinos, which have almost no interaction with matter and
thus escape into outer space.
The effect of a large antimatter bomb would likely be
similar to that of a nuclear explosion of similar size. The reacting antimatter
would release about half of its energy in a form immediately available to the
environment, superheating the casing and components of the bomb and the
surrounding air, and turning it into ultra-hot plasma which then emits Thermal
Radiation in the full EM spectrum. A quantity as small as a kilogram of
antimatter would release 1.8×1017 J (180 petajoules) of energy.
Given that roughly half the energy will escape as non-interacting neutrinos(
they are sub-atomic particles found in the neutron of an atom), which gives 90
petajoules of combined blast and EM radiation, or the rough equivalent of a 20
megaton thermonuclear bomb.
Antimatter production and containment are major
obstacles to the creation of antimatter weapons or using it as an Energy
source. One gram of antimatter annihilating with one gram of matter produces 180 terajoules as much energy enough to
power an average city for an extensive amount of time.
In reality, however, all known technologies for
producing antimatter involve particle accelerators, and they are currently
still highly inefficient and expensive. The production rate per year is only 1
to 10 Nano grams. In 2008, the annual production of antiprotons at
the Antiproton Decelerator facility of CERN was several picograms at a cost of
$20 million. Thus, at the current level of production, an equivalent of a 10MT hydrogen
bomb, about 250 grams of antimatter will take 2.5 million years of the energy
production of the entire Earth to produce. A milligram of antimatter will take
100000 times the annual production rate to produce (or 100000 years), It will
take billions of years for the current production rate to make an equivalent of
current typical hydrogen bomb.
Since the first creation of artificial antiprotons in
1955, production rates increased nearly geometrically until the mid 1980's; a
significant advancement was made recently as a single anti-hydrogen atom was
produced suspended in a magnetic field. Physical laws such as the small
cross-section of antiproton production in high-energy nuclear collisions make
it difficult and perhaps impossible to drastically improve the production
efficiency of antimatter.
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| (Photo: CERN / Niels Madsen) A photo of the ALPHA experimental apparatus |
Even if it were possible to convert energy directly
into particle/antiparticle pairs without any loss, a large-scale power plant
generating 2000 MWe would take 25 hours to produce just one gram of antimatter.
Given the average price of electric power around $50 per megawatt hour, this
puts a lower limit on the cost of antimatter at $2.5 million per gram. They
suggest that this would make antimatter very cost-effective as a rocket fuel,
as just one milligram would be enough to send a probe to Pluto and back in a
year, a mission that would be completely unaffordable with conventional fuels.
Incidentally the cost of the Manhattan Project (to produce the first atomic
bomb) is estimated at $20 billion in 1996 prices. Most scientists however would
doubt whether such efficiencies could ever be achieved.
The second problem is the containment of antimatter.
Antimatter annihilates with regular matter on contact, so it would be necessary
to prevent contact, for example by producing antimatter in the form of solid
charged or magnetized particles, and suspending them using electromagnetic
fields in near-perfect vacuum. Another, more hypothetical method is the storage
of antiprotons inside fullerenes. The negatively charged antiprotons would
repel the electron cloud around the sphere of carbon, so they could not get
near enough to the normal protons to annihilate with them.
In order to achieve compactness given macroscopic
weight, the overall electric charge of the antimatter weapon core would have to
be very small compared to the number of particles. For example, it is not
feasible to construct perhaps an energy core using positrons alone, due to
their mutual repulsion. The antimatter energy core would have to consist
primarily of neutral antiparticles. Extremely small amounts of antihydrogen have been produced in
laboratories, but containing them (by cooling them to temperatures of several millikelvins
and trapping them in a Penning trap) is extremely difficult. And even if these
proposed experiments were successful, they would only trap several antihydrogen
atoms for research purposes, far too few for powering a small city or for
spacecraft propulsion. Heavier antimatter atoms have yet to be produced.
Now imagine
I have an antimatter particle, I only need to combine it with matter to
generate energy to power the World! ( with obviously very reduced nuclear fallout
(which can be contained with Lead lined reactors –potable reactors -) as
compared to a fission or fusion reaction. Fellow Engineers or Engineers to be,
if only we could develop a cheap way to create and store antimatter we will
solve the world’s energy challenge ( I refuse to see a problem but a
challenge). Shell estimated that by the year 2050, the world’s energy demand
would have doubled. Why don’t we give the world a solution, I am equally
working on many energy solutions (ideas from a 21 year old kid who wants to
change the world).
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| An example of how an anti-matter reactor would look like |
Energy is
all around us – ( the universe, the Van Allen Belt, the Belts around Jupiter
etc.) – and mostly in us – ( matter, the atom etc.) – all we have to do is open
our eyes to see more clearly…
I hope I
have stirred up somebody’s imagination, so until next time…
READ WELL……. READ WIDE……. AND THINK DIFFERENTLY
Additional Reference
Wikipedia | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon
Or you can just search it out on Google.