Wait for it...
I’m not sure how to feel about this. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great scientific advance of immense (scientific) value, but if you’re not a scientist or a science nerd, it means absolutely nothing.
The breakthrough gets us one tiny step closer to understanding what happened to antimatter after the Big Bang and could eventually (if we somehow find antimatter in space and can collect it) solve all of our energy problems – the reaction between matter and antimatter creates a huge amount of energy.
The energy per unit mass (9×1016 J/kg) is about 10 orders of magnitude greater than chemical energy, about 4 orders of magnitude greater than nuclear energy that can be liberated today using nuclear fission, and about 2 orders of magnitude greater than the best possible from fusion.
The reaction of 1 kilogram of antimatter with 1 kilogram of matter would produce 180 petajoules of energy or the rough equivalent of 43 megatons of TNT. For comparison, Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, reacted an estimated yield of 50 megatons, which required the use of hundreds of kilograms of fissile material.
The reason why I’m not extremely excited about the news is that at the current antimatter production rate, CERN would need to spend 2 quadrillion dollars and run the antimatter facility for 2 billion years in order to produce 1 gram of it. And that one gram would probably be used to make a bomb, because that’s how humankind rolls.
As for using antimatter as an energy source, this is what a CERN scientist had to say:
Can we hope to use antimatter as a source of energy? Do you feel antimatter could power vehicles in the future, or would it just be used for major power sources?
There is no possibility to use antimatter as energy ‘source’. Unlike solar energy, coal or oil, antimatter does not occur in nature; we first have to make every single antiparticle, and we have to invest (much) more energy than we get back during annihilation.
You can imagine antimatter as a storage medium for energy, much like you store electricity in rechargeable batteries. The process of charging the battery is reversible with relatively small loss. Still, it takes more energy to charge the battery than you get back.
The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion (10-10) of the invested energy back. If we could assemble all the antimatter we’ve ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes.
So, um, yay… we can trap antimatter.
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