What Are Some Examples of Things That Antimatter Could Be Used to Power

Feasibility of Antimatter Power Plants

Genevieve Payzer
December 18, 2018

Submitted as coursework for PH240, Stanford Academy, Fall 2017

Introduction

Fig. 1: Feynman diagram demonstrating mutual annihilation of an electron and a positron. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

A staple of scientific discipline fiction that tries to explain interstellar travel is utilize of matter-antimatter reactors equally a power source. Does antimatter make a good fuel to ability the starships of tomorrow? What near more earthbound uses? The brusque answer is no. We will meet that, although there are patents and proposals for long altitude interplanetary or even interstellar travel making use of antimatter fuel in some distant hereafter, more than earthbound energy generation from antimatter does non make sense.

Description of Antimatter

At that place are several esoteric subatomic antimatter particles, with the beingness of more of them a subject of on-going experiments. Perhaps the simplest antimatter particles for the educated not-scientist to sympathize are positrons and antiprotons, corresponding to their (non-anti) matter counterparts, respectively, electrons and protons. The antimatter particles take contrary charge from their thing counterparts, positive charge for positrons and negative for antiprotons. [1] Aside from their charges and potentially explosive backdrop when contacting regular matter, antimatter particles such equally positrons and antiprotons are expected to obey the same physical laws as regular matter. CERN is testing this matter-antimatter symmetry in experiments with captured anti-hydrogen atoms. [2,iii]

Relative Free energy Level Available

Compared to even a thermonuclear engine, an equal mass of matter plus antimatter volition produce two orders of magnitude more energy. When antimatter meets matter an annihilation reaction results. The meeting of a proton and an anti-proton for case produces ix × 10¹⁶ Joules/kilogram vs. a nuclear reaction using D + He-3 which produces hydrogen, helium, and some neutrons, yielding 3.52 × 10^fourteen Joules/kilogram. [iv]

New or Improved Antimatter Handling Technology Required

1 of the more ambitious proposals for collecting antimatter involves stimulating our sun to produce information technology for us. Orbiting Solar Observatory‐7 based spectrogram analysis of solar flare interaction with the upper atmosphere showed that cosmic rays from the sun produce some positrons. [5] Based on this observation, this speculative proposal suggests using a space-based nuclear pumped 10-ray laser "to induce a pattern of excited plasma in the solar atmosphere" to stimulate more positron generation via "synthetic solar flare." [half dozen] Aside from the proposal's writer'due south confusion of a DARPA non-nuclear plan with a nuclear-based program of the same name, one trouble with the proposal, fifty-fifty assuming the difficulties in harvesting positrons out at that place could be overcome, is that the Excalibur nuclear pumped X-ray laser program cited in the proposal was a failure. [7,8] Several United States government patents have been granted for the capture and handling of antimatter. [9-12]

Antimatter clearly is something that you can't just have in casual storage. Since contact with normal thing results in high-energy annihilation, antimatter must be stored in a vacuum and contained by an electromagnetic field. [13] An accident at a facility that produced antimatter in sufficient quantity for spacecraft propulsion, for example, would exist bailiwick to disastrous explosions should containment of the latest batch of antiprotons fail. Given previous unfounded public hysteria surrounding possible black hole production at CERN, any industrial-scale antimatter product facility should exist located at an isolated location, perhaps on the moon. [xiv,xv]

Free energy Investment Required to Collect Antimatter

Once a given quantity of antimatter is available, information technology is nanogram-per-nanogram the most powerful fuel available. The problem is that current methods of producing antimatter crave much more than energy than the antimatter in turn will yield. Storing the antimatter then that it is safe from annihilation also requires a groovy deal of energy since conventional containers cannot exist used and the antimatter is contained using magnetic fields.

All around us, here on World, all is matter. Antimatter cannot terminal long without the special containment fields and techniques. Upon contact betwixt matter and antimatter, there is annihilation. But what if there are regions out there in space that are all antimatter, just as our region of space is all matter? This question touches on theories of the "big blindside" from which the universe is believed to have originated. If the universe started out concentrated in one place, any antimatter would have annihilated itself and a respective amount of matter, and so some modification of the large bang theory would exist required that allowed antimatter regions to form without beingness annihilated. [16] Current predominant theories make it unlikely that space trawlers will harvest antimatter for purposes of energy production.

Antimatter is currently only generated on purpose by people and stored in laboratories for use in scientific studies, generally of the properties of antimatter. [13] Some medical diagnostic equipment makes employ of positrons, every bit in PET (Positron Emission Tomography), for example, merely these are not captured or stored. The lab methods currently in use for production of antimatter are not efficient plenty for any practical propulsion or other energy applications, with one unit of antimatter free energy requiring 10 billion units of energy to produce the antimatter. [13]

Applications of Energy From Antimatter

Of all of the potential energy-from-antimatter applications, propulsion from infinite travel is the most prominent, even receiving attention and funding from NASA. [17] Although pure antimatter-matter reaction propulsion systems would require more antimatter than we can produce in the foreseeable time to come, hybrid systems that utilise modest quantities of antimatter as "catalysts" to generate higher-than-normal-energy fusion reactions would exist more than feasible. These would all the same crave considerable development of propulsion engineering science, industrial standard antimatter production, and reliably safe antimatter containment and direction techniques. If perfected, however, such "antimatter-catalyzed" fusion propulsion systems would brand possible circular trips to Mars and Jupiter in the range of 1.v and 3 years, respectively. [thirteen]

Conclusion

There are many minds at piece of work on the long range goal of finer limitless energy. Physicists and crackpots akin are working with theoretical equations, supercomputers, high-energy colliders, and deceptively simple Feynman diagrams (Fig. 1). [18] As suggested in the Containment section above, fifty-fifty if practically useful quantities of antimatter were obtainable and even if the production or storage facilities were located on the moon, there is all the same a considerable leaky container problem to solve. At that place are decades of feel in attempting to magnetically contain more conventional (not-antimatter) plasmas for purposes of nuclear fusion, but even these have not yet advanced to the betoken that there are commercially viable fusion reactors. The stakes with antimatter energy generation would be much higher. Containment leakage from a plasma fusion reactor would mean that the fusion would stop rather quickly, as the plasma immediately cooled. Leakage from an antimatter reactor would effect in a much larger explosion, with the antimatter annihilating an equal quantity of matter with virtually all of the thing and antimatter converted into energy (come across the 9x10^sixteen Joules/kilogram number above). [4] It would be premature to abandon any of our current free energy sources in favor of antimatter simply withal, merely it is OK to watch your favorite science fiction drama and dream nearly the future.

© Genevieve Payzer. The writer warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes just. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.

References

[one] G. B. Andresen, et al., "Trapped Antihydrogen," Nature 468, 673 (2010).

[ii] C. Smorra, et al., "A Parts-per-Billion Measurement of the Antiproton Magnetic Moment," Nature 550, 371 (2017).

[3] Yard. Ahmadi et al., "Observation of the Hyperfine Spectrum of Antihydrogen," Nature 548, 66 (2017).

[four] S. K. Borowski, "Comparison of Fusion/Antiproton Propulsion Systems for Interplanetary Travel," in Fusion Energy in Space Propulsion, ed. by T. Kammash (AIAA, 1995) pp. 89-127, ninety.

[5] S. Gaidos, "Cosmic Mystery: High-Hyphen'due south Energy Invaders From Space Could Signal a Nearby Pulsar, or Peradventure Dark Affair," Scientific discipline News, 175, No. 5, sixteen (2009).

[6] W. Mook, "Industrial Production of Positronium and Its Uses," J. Infinite Philosophy four, No. 2, 105 (2015).

[7] R. L. Park, Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford University Printing, 2000) pp. 186-188.

[eight] T. E. Repetti, "Application of Reactor-Pumped Lasers to Power Beaming," Idaho National Applied science Laboratory, October 1991, p. 17.

[nine] G. A. Smith, "Appliance and Method for Long-Term Storage of Antimatter," U.S. Patent 7,709,819. four May 10.

[10] G. A, Smith, R. A. Lewis, and S. D.Howe, "Container for Transporting Antiprotons," U.S. Patent half-dozen,160,263, 12 Dec 00.

[11] B. I. Deutsch, "Process for Preparing Antihydrogen," U.Southward. Patent 4,867,939, 19 Sep 89.

[12] Fifty. Kasprowicz, "Organization for the Storage and Transportation of Anti-Thing," U.S. Patent 6,606,370, 12 Aug 03.

[13] M. G. Millis and Eric Due west. Davis, Frontiers of Propulsion Science (AIAA, 2009) pp. 564, 73, 75, 78.

[14] Eastward. Harrell, "Collider Triggers Terminate-of-World Fears," Time Mag, 4 Sep 08.

[15] A. Selk, "Newly Discovered Moon Tunnel Could Exist the Perfect Identify for a Colony, Scientists Say, Chicago Tribune, 21 Oct 17.

[16] A. I. Sanda and I. I. Bigi, CP Violation (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

[17] C. O'Connell, "Antimatter to Ion Drives: NASA's Plans for Deep Space Propulsion, Cosmos, xviii Mar 16.

[18] D. Kaiser "Physics and Feynman'due south Diagrams," Am. Sci. 93, 156 (2005).

pylesomptince.blogspot.com

Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph240/payzer1/