[Kosh]

Up to 16 minutes now

"We've trapped antihydrogen atoms for as long as 1,000 seconds, which is forever" in the world of high-energy particle physics, said Joel Fajans, UC Berkeley professor of physics, faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

The ALPHA team is hard at work building a new antihydrogen trap with "the hope that by 2012 we will have a new trap with laser access to allow spectroscopic experiments on the antiatoms," he said.

Fajans and the ALPHA team, which includes Jonathan Wurtele, UC Berkeley professor of physics, will publish their latest successes online on June 5 in advance of print publication in the journal Nature Physics. Fajans, Wurtele and their graduate students played major roles in designing the antimatter trap and other aspects of the experiment.

Their paper reports that in a series of measurements last year, the team trapped 112 antiatoms for times ranging from one-fifth of a second to 1,000 seconds, or 16 minutes and 40 seconds.

So when can we start building Helios bombs?

[Mustang19]

Sure but they'll blow up in your face 16 minutes later.

[Nuke]

and how much energy did this containment system use up? it would be somewhat inefficient if the energy spent containing the antimatter was more than the energy you would get reacting said antimatter with matter.

[Mongoose]

This is at the basic research phase, so I doubt they're concerned about energy recovery.

[Luis Dias]

lol the purpose of this ain't to get "energy" out of it. The purpose is to study fundamental physics.

[Nuke]

well aware of that, but kosh did bring up the idea to weaponize the stuff. to weaponize antimatter the containment system would need to powered by some kind of secondary energy source, like a nuclear or fusion reactor, or perhaps really, really, really good batteries. so if it takes a very large amount of power to maintain containment from fueling to detonation (with delivery somewhere in the middle), like on the order of the energy released by a small nuclear warhead, why not just use the warhead? unless of course you're attempting to create a yield far greater than what nukes can accomplish (as far as h-bombs go there is no theoretical maximum yield, yield is proportional to the amount of fusible fuel in the secondary, tertiary, etc). weaponizing antimatter is a ways away yet, and the fact that the weapon is on a hair trigger, were all it would take is a well placed emp and it will blow up in your face before you can launch it.

now if you wanted to use antimatter for power generation or propulsion, containment systems will be essential. it will be necessary to have the containment system run off of a fraction of the reactor output. if you have a situation where containment costs half of your output things might be manageable, though not efficient, and hard to make safe, might be viable for deep space propulsion, but noone would want to build an antimatter power station on the ground. if you need 90% of the output just to prevent the whole reactor from exploding then you have a problem. now if you have a reactor that uses maybe 25% of output for containment, then you can improve safety by running multiple reactors in tandem, so if one reactor starts too loose containment, you can pull power from other reactors to maintain it. you still have something that will blow up in your face if it gets emped.

[Bobboau]

couldn't you power the containment system with the anti-mater it's self? I mean just have a trickle of the stuff leaving the containment chamber and into a simple reactor.
sure it might run out after a few million years, but practically speaking it should work.

[Luis Dias]

That would work if the energy you got out of anti-matter was higher than the energy you put into creating and containing it. Alas, the ratio is most probably something in the order of 100000000:1 in that equation.... but on the wrong side

[Bobboau]

yeah, at the moment, but I have a feeling that ratio is going to improve before too long.

[Luis Dias]

It's not as if there are a dozen orders of magnitude to conquer, but heeeey, why don't you try it?

[NGTM-1R]

IIRC it's been asserted before that antimatter will never be actually efficient, thus it's only likely to find a home in applications where raw power output is more important than anything.

[Luis Dias]

Sort of like what hydrogen is.

there are other marginal efforts to create energy that aren't widely publicized, but there's a form of a garden variety of them, with resources to try to pull it off too. Most of them involve some form of fusion, either by laser beams, or by electro confinement, or, gasp, cold fusion as well (a sort of rennaissance of the somewhat tragicomical tech that was put aside ten years ago...)

[General Battuta]

Sort of like what hydrogen is.

there are other marginal efforts to create energy that aren't widely publicized, but there's a form of a garden variety of them, with resources to try to pull it off too. Most of them involve some form of fusion, either by laser beams, or by electro confinement, or, gasp, cold fusion as well (a sort of rennaissance of the somewhat tragicomical tech that was put aside ten years ago...)

I think you're not quite getting what NGTM1R is saying - there's simply no way to ever extract energy from (synth) antimatter. It will never be a power source. It can only, in effect, be used as a weapon, or perhaps in propulsion.

Unless antimatter can be discovered naturally, it is only useful as a way to package energy in a form that can be released catastrophically. Antimatter synthesis will never be net positive simply due to conservation of energy.

[Bobboau]

well, yeah, that much is obvious.

[General Battuta]

Well I can't see any other reason he'd compare antimatter synth to fusion.

[Klaustrophobia]

Sort of like what hydrogen is.

there are other marginal efforts to create energy that aren't widely publicized, but there's a form of a garden variety of them, with resources to try to pull it off too. Most of them involve some form of fusion, either by laser beams, or by electro confinement, or, gasp, cold fusion as well (a sort of rennaissance of the somewhat tragicomical tech that was put aside ten years ago...)

I think you're not quite getting what NGTM1R is saying - there's simply no way to ever extract energy from (synth) antimatter. It will never be a power source. It can only, in effect, be used as a weapon, or perhaps in propulsion.

Unless antimatter can be discovered naturally, it is only useful as a way to package energy in a form that can be released catastrophically. Antimatter synthesis will never be net positive simply due to conservation of energy.

i recall hearing somewhere that the sun produces something like a kilo or so every year (during CMEs maybe?  don't remember that part).  of course the feasibility of capturing it is astronomically low but 10000 years from now, who knows?

[redsniper]

Try about 350 years. UEF catches all kinds of anti-matter from the sun. (Or so I hear)

[Mongoose]

I thought they just slowly drifted into it.

[Kosh]

Sort of like what hydrogen is.

there are other marginal efforts to create energy that aren't widely publicized, but there's a form of a garden variety of them, with resources to try to pull it off too. Most of them involve some form of fusion, either by laser beams, or by electro confinement, or, gasp, cold fusion as well (a sort of rennaissance of the somewhat tragicomical tech that was put aside ten years ago...)

I think you're not quite getting what NGTM1R is saying - there's simply no way to ever extract energy from (synth) antimatter. It will never be a power source. It can only, in effect, be used as a weapon, or perhaps in propulsion.

Unless antimatter can be discovered naturally, it is only useful as a way to package energy in a form that can be released catastrophically. Antimatter synthesis will never be net positive simply due to conservation of energy.

While it won't be energy positive as a whole, it can be used as the ultimate energy storage system to power a ship. It doesn't just need to be a weapon, it can be a really awesome battery.

[General Battuta]

While it won't be energy positive as a whole, it can be used as the ultimate energy storage system to power a ship. It doesn't just need to be a weapon, it can be a really awesome battery.

Yeah that's what I just said in what you quoted.