Physicists drive antihydrogen breakthrough at CERN
phys.org90 points by naves 5 days ago
90 points by naves 5 days ago
I think the same subject was addressed in both of these...
The first one "220" has a nice discussion, in particular a comment by pfdietz:
> It increases the rate of production of neutral antihydrogen from antiprotons and positrons by a factor of 8. It doesn't increase the efficiency of production of antiprotons, which is the extremely inefficient, energy intensive part.
This piece argues that antimatter could be feasible for space propulsion and we could start developing it now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46073414
If you can electromagnetically trap enough antimatter to use it as fuel you could as well trap a miniature charged black hole that can be fed regular matter to produce power, which skips the whole inefficient part of making antimatter.
Miniature black holes would just evaporate. Antimatter wouldn't.
Not before efficiently converting a large amount of mass into usable energy.
Depends. Do we know how to obtain a miniature black hole?
There have been several proposals. This paper proposes a feasable mechanism[1]:
-"a SBH could be artificially created by firing a huge number of gamma rays from a spherically converging laser. The idea is to pack so much energy into such a small space that a BH will form."
There’s a recent paper on the formation of such a “kugelblitz”; it’s argued to be unfeasible.
> a miniature charged black hole that can be fed regular matter to produce power,
What form of power and through what principle?
Hawking radiation, I think. Yes, this is at best speculatively feasible.
There was also a great episode on antimatter engines recently by PBS Space Time.