Antimatter has been transported for the first time
nature.com220 points by leephillips 4 hours ago
220 points by leephillips 4 hours ago
Unclear on the size of the apparatus require to secure the 92 anti-protons - did it occupy the entire truck?
If containment was to fail, it the total energy released would have been approximately 2.766 * 10 ^ -8 J, so it wasn't particularly dangerous
It would be trivial to reroute power from the secondary systems to the forward shields anyway
What is that in firecrackers?
Gemini says a firecracker releases 150 J, so yeah not a lot.
It's a fraction of the energy released when an unlit fire cracker is dropped an inch. Basically unmeasurable
Wolfram Alpha says its approximately the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight
Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!
Definitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and you can actually feel it hit your skin.
E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.
indeed, but note that c^2 is just a factor to convert between units here and is completely arbitrary (or rather, c is so high because our units are human scale)
indeed, in the most natural systems of units in this area, we set c = 1 as to simplify the equations
Wolfram Alpha says it's approximately _one-sixth_ the kinetic energy of a mosquito in flight
When we're talking scales like 10^-23, "one" and "one sixth" are comparable enough to warrant an "approximately".
I'm not sure! One is just barely within human scale and one isn't. I think I could feel the impact of a mosquito on a sufficiently sensitive patch of skin. I'm not sure I could do the same with one sixth of a mosquito. Its like the difference between something I can lift (100 lb) and something I definitely cannot lift (600lb)
It was on the radio here (I live on its route)- the ‚receiving’ physicist said it would be way less than what we catch anyway from daily cosmic radiation.
For 92 protons? So 3*10^-10 J per proton?
For a tiny number, that is still insanely high...
I definitely was expecting "transported" to be some kind of teleportation when I clicked this link. Too much sci-fi!
Totally sounded like Star Trek. LOL. I imagined Mr. Scott yelling something about the transporters not being able to lock onto the antimatter.
Angels & Demons anyone?
From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity.
Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle.
Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?
The confinement scheme used here is likely a Penning Trap. Such devices are limited in the amount of antimatter they can store by the Brillouin limit. The energy stored will be no more than the magnetic energy of the field of the trap, and so much less than the explosive yield of a mass of TNT (say) equal to the mass of the trap.
From a layman's point of view, I'm more interested in antimatter's potential as a weapon.
Not necessarily because I want to use it, but because I have a vague idea of what it's capable of, and what that would mean in the hands of certain groups capable of producing it.
The big advantage of nuclear weapons is they are very cheap per unit of energy yield. Bang for the buck, if you will.
Antimatter production is so inefficient that they will be much more expensive per unit energy yield.
There are a lot of completely random statements about how much a gram costs floating around out there. Anywhere from $60T to $3,000T.
According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."
S: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-19/antimatter-fa...
Not that great. Chances are you will destroy your country before you destroy some other.
Not to be dramatic, but wouldn't that level of destruction threaten all life on Earth? After the immediate destruction of the first county, extreme climate change would cause the same kind of problems as nuclear winter would, no?
> ideal spacecraft fuel
If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation.
I suppose at least it will kill you faster than your neurons can communicate so you wouldn't even notice.
> If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation.
Don't you have that problem with any energy-dense fuel? It's just that it doesn get more dense than that, so you can be very space and weight efficient.
It's like everybody saying that a hydrogen car is a rolling bomb because of the energy stored in the hydrogen. Well, sure, but gasonline has just as much energy stored. Which is the whole point of fuel. To store energy. It's not like you are bringing 100x as much energy with you just because it's hydrogen. So that doesn't make an ICE car any less of a bomb...
Surely you understand there's a difference?
Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match.
Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors.
And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.
Antimatter is a completely different story.
The difference is that antimatter annihilates with any normal matter that it comes into contact with. This means you can't just put it in a tank, the way you can with hydrogen. You can't e.g. combine it with some metal to make a metal hydride to make it safer to store, the way you can with hydrogen.
At an absolute minimum, you need extremely strong magnetic confinement and an extremely hard vacuum. And even then, you're going to get collisions with stray atoms and annihilation events which release gamma rays and other radiation products - although shielding is probably the least of your worries in this scenario.
A typical research lab at a university or large corporation can't make a vacuum strong enough to store even tiny quantities of antimatter for more than a few minutes, and they can't produce the magnetic confinement strength required to store macro quantities of it, either.
So the question with an antimatter-powered car is not if it's going to destroy the surrounding region and bathe it in hard radiation, but how many milliseconds (or less) it will take before that inevitably happens.
But probably luckily for us, this is all moot, because we have no way of producing enough antimatter for this to be an issue. If all the antimatter that's ever been created by humans annihilated simultaneously, only scientists monitoring their instruments closely enough would notice, because it's such a microscopic amount.
Edit: for perspective, you'd need about 7 billion times the 92 antiprotons transported in the truck in the story to produce the energy produced by a single grain of gunpowder.
You can easily put it into an antimatter tank ;-)
Only if you wear antimatter gloves while doing it.
Also, now your tank is just fuel as well.
If you're on a spacecraft you're sitting on a tank of rocket fuel anyway. It's the same problem, just slightly less total.
Average human threat perceptions simply aren't useful here. People will also make wild assumptions about what kind of catastrophic thing could happen in aviation and then happily enter their car to drive somewhere without a thought in the world. In fact noone thought about designing gasoline fuel tanks in a safe way before we had cars. Not even really until people started burning. If we're already thinking about transporting antimatter safely today, this kind of technology will probably have an even better track record than planes.
Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.
You can carry exactly (or roughly) as much energy in the form of antimatter as you would energy in the form of fuel.
The problem is that a tiny leak will eat away your spacecraft, thereby making the situation worse.
Except rocket fuel lines are often leaking, and the most common cause of launch delays.
With antimatter the tiniest leak will annihilate your ship.
Very tough engineering problem. Amount transported is 92 atoms. A mole (1 gram) of anti-hydrogen is 6.23x10^23 atoms.
When I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock)
The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.
If humanity doesn't perish in the next hundred year and masters interplanetary spaceflight, antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion.
Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.
> antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion
Maybe. Beamed propulsion makes a hell of a lot more sense in the solar system.
Not familiar with the subject so genuine question. HOW would antimatter be used as fuel? There is energy released in matter antimatter annihilation, but where would the force to move a spacecraft come from?
> Various antiproton-powered rocket systems have been proposed. All of which rely on the particles released to supply direct thrust or to heat a working fluid by interparticle collisions or by heating a solid core first [14]. There is also the possibility to use the heated working fluid to generate electricity for electric propulsion systems [14].
> Following Fig. 9, beam core and plasma core configurations can produce direct thrust by directing the charged particles produced into an exhaust beam using a magnetic nozzle. Gas core systems use the energy released from the reaction to heat a gas that is exhausted for thrust. Finally, solid core configuration heats a metal core like Tungsten that acts as a heat exchanger to a propellant that is then exhausted from a regular nozzle.
Not the same paper, but goes into more detail.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266620272...
The always excellent PBS Space Time recently did an episode on antimatter drives:
my absolutely-non-expert guess is that it would work much like any other fuel? Combine with matter, get a lot of head out of it and use that in the best way we know.
Black holes are good star ship engines because they turn everything into Hawking radiation.
Can you elaborate? Why is HR useful for starship engines?
I suppose they mean if you could harness Hawking radiation to do useful work, then you could use any matter as fuel.
I am curious about how much energy needs to be expanded to contain the anti-matter. Say it the matter/anti-matter is to be used for propulsion/energy generation can we reach a threshold were we are actually energy positive
“Antimatter in a truck” is great headline material, but the actual advance is portable precision instrumentation.
CERN can make/store the antiprotons, but not measure them as cleanly as they want because the facility itself introduces tiny magnetic fluctuations. So this is really a story about moving the sample to a quieter lab, not moving toward sci-fi antimatter batteries... for now
Yeah, it's really impressive to me that they can make antiparticles, put them in a container, count them, transport them and count them again.
Nonetheless, "moving antimatter by truck" is pretty SF. More grounded than epic space opera, but stillvery cool.
It almost could be a Hollywood movie in the vein of Sorceror. Couple of grizzled CERN vets transporting a volatile load of antimatter across a post-apocalyptic wasteland while being chased by energy terrorists.
Next milestone: put it in Warptruck™ as fuel
A certain car company CEO is about to announce the availability of that in "5-10 years"
I was once transporting antipasti and no one wrote HN post about it :(
I make a pasta/antipasta joke every time I'm at an italian resteraunt and no one ever laughs :(
Annihilation of Italian food is nothing to laugh at, and is in fact a tragedy
I thought the entire point of being given a plate of Italian food was to annihilate it, followed by some tiramisu.
How could we make enough antimatter to do something useful? Would we need to go hang out near the sun or deorbit Jupiter's moons with superconducting coils to get enough energy?
What would a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter look like?
It would develop into "regions" of space that are entirely matter and others that are entirely antimatter. The boundaries between them would glow as stray particles drift between the regions and are annihilated by contact with the opposing particles.
The fact that we don't see these glowing boundaries in space is evidence that there are not antimatter regions and that the visible universe is almost entirely composed of matter.
It would depend on how it's distributed. If it's very homogeneous, totally anihilated. If there are galaxies of matter and galaxies of antimatter, more or less like us with a bit more background radiation.
How do we know there are no antimatter galaxies far away from us?
Mass in the universe appears to be (very) roughly uniformly distributed, so even if there are large bodies of antimatter far away in the universe there would have to be a transition boundary somewhere between here and there where the universe goes from being mostly matter to being mostly antimatter. The universe is big and stuff would sometimes cross this boundary and get annihilated, and if this happened it would be the brightest thing in the sky, briefly outshining entire galaxies. We’ve been watching the sky for a while now and have never observed a bright visual event with the spectral signature of a matter/antimatter annihilation, so we assume there is not such a transition boundary, and by extension that the universe is made up of mostly matter out to the edge of the observable universe.
Great explanation. One thing to add: annihilation happens with a very specific energy. Even if it was very far away and redshifted and dim, a "bubble" with a very uniform color (photon energy) would be plainly visible.
There's a great episode about this on History of the Universe yt channel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJGaqe5t14g
It talks about symmetries, but has a nice story about this exact hypothetical scenario. (Someone else already replied why this probably isn't possible in our observable universe, but the episode is cool so I thought I'd share)
Sounds like the start of research ending in antimatter bombs.
Unless we'd be fighting literal alines in space, and need a weapon for them, I think this would be many many many orders of magnitude too expensive / tricky for earth use. We have plenty of non sci-fi big boom sticks already as it is...
The energy used in creating and containing this antimatter was many orders of magnitude greater than it would release on collision with matter.
Only 92 antiprotons but still an exciting feat
You (briefly) have an antiproton in your possession around once a day, assuming you get an average amount of sunlight. Some days, you might even have two!
This just in: seasonal affective disorder confirmed to be caused by antiproton deficiency
antimatter is not what the average person thinks it is from science-fiction
https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime/search?query=antimatte...
pssh, antineutrinos are transported all the time!
That's a contentious statement! We're not sure if they are or aren't.
More accurately: we aren't sure if antineutrinos are the same or different from neutrinos!
Every time I read one of these, I am amazed by how much stuff superconductivity allows, and how limited we are because it needs ultra low temperatures.
Imagine the poor post-doc in the back of the truck, no seatbelt, watching and noting anything going on, while the driver is doing donuts in a parking lot to really stress-test the magnetic containment.
Tell me this involved dilithium crystals. Please tell me this involved dilithium, I want to live in Gene's future.
Stop, driver should have license for hauling antimatter and as far as I believe no one is giving those out. That’s major offense in trucking industry.
Yes, only anti-truckers can haul anti-matter since normal CDLs only let you transport ordinary matter. You have to be very careful not to let the anti-trucker go to a ordinary truck stop because things really go down if they run into a ordinary trucker.
There is some good greta joke hidden there but I had enough dovnvotes for today
I'm glad we have an expert on Swiss commercial trucking regulations here.
I know this is all just tongue-in-cheek, but for the record, they only drove it around for 30 min around the lab site, not on the open roads.
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