Last week I had the chance to visit CERN's Antimatter Factory, and let me tell you I was feeling like a child on Christmas Day.
The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive. That they are considering sending it hundreds of km away is mind blowing.
That's awesome. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting CERN too. Curious, what part of the visit stood out as especially impressive? Last I checked, there was a pretty long waiting list for tours.
If you want to visit Atlas (control room) or CERN’s first accelerator (a synchrocyclotron) just show up in the morning when the visitor center opens. The tour guides are often passionate scientists. The museum is worth visiting, you’ll get to see the first www server (Tim-Berner Lee’s nextcube). The live shows are well put together. And everything is pretty much free of charge.
The only thing I can think of that has a waiting period is if you want to visit the actual tunnels, you can only visit them in between experiments (every 10-20 years maybe even less often).
I work for the control group at another accelerator, so we were visiting and meeting their control guys. Super friendly people all of them, they treated us like kings... and their control centre is bigger than our whole facility xD
I've seen this expressed before, but every picture I've seen of CERN just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics. So I'm not sure why people react like you do towards it. Is it different from seeing it in pictures?
To me things like tokamak fusion reactors or rockets or even places like the massive piles of pipe work outside of SpaceX's launch site feel way cooler.
When I look at that pile, I see hundreds or thousands of devices that need to be working in concert to produce a meaningful result. Devices that need to be triggered exactly when the particle bunch travels by at near speed of light. These devices then generate data that needs to be stored somewhere and in a way that is later useful to the scientists.
The complexity hiding within the pile is immense, and that is what makes it impressive to me.
I see about the same thing as you do, only I am basically also picturing Ghostbusters who also had some very specific tooling for trapping, containing, and transporting ghosts, which was all central to the plot of the original film.
I can just foresee a future asshole European mayor who swaggers into the CERN remote antimatter facility and shuts it all down, triggering Armageddon and a new rampage by the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Because we are massive science nerds. I have been interested in this kind of stuff since I was a little kid. Which leads to the second point...
I ended up working at another accelerator facility, so even though I am an IT guy, I actually understand what I am looking at, which helps to increase the enjoyment.
One great way to enjoy the visit and get an idea of what you are looking at is to pick something very specific, like some connector or box, and ask what it does. Then ask what happens when it fails. The answer to the later question is almost invariably interesting - even in relatively mundane places like a power plant or fire truck.
You are getting downvoted but it made me wonder (I visited CERN a few years ago). I guess there are two aspects in play. One, the pile is massive, which naturally inspires awe, especially in person. Two, I know that what I'm looking at is actually a unique super advanced piece of technology, which took countless hours to produce, and that influences how one sees it.
Man, I've been in their underground part, every 5 years they open for public and open the detectors themselves. It was by huge margin by far the best executed engineering of any type I ever saw, and I don't consider myself a nerd in this area. Every tiny detail was simply perfect, not a speck of dust, all cables aligned perfectly etc. Seeing inner parts of these massive detector tubes (maybe 10x20m ?) was the pinnacle of the show.
Pictures simply don't do it justice. One can't replace physical travelling and experiencing things (and people) for whatever purpose and this shows it well.
That being said, since I live not far from there, I certainly hope that containment is flawless, don't want to experience matter-antimatter annihilation of non-trivial amounts anywhere near my kids, or myself for that matter (NIMBYism at its best, get your damn antimatter off my lawn!)
> just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics
You just described a tokamak fusion reactor. So at the end of the day you either know exactly what you're looking at and are in awe of the entire achievement, or have no idea what you're looking at and maybe are in awe of the massive pile of engineeringy looking bits and bobs.
Same effect visiting any massive chemical plant or oil refinery (because the processes usually require a lot of pipes, huge containers, and so on), that make you wonder "how on Earth do they even remember where everything is, let alone design and build it".
Not much different from art if you think about it. You can see a masterpiece painting, or some paint on a piece of cloth.
But for all of the above, when you know what those are, the impressive effect is amplified.
- your antimatter qualifies for Free Shipping if you purchase additional eligible particles up to $100,000,000
- or choose default shipping (no containment used, wait for spontaneous virtual quantum particle in your vicinity) approx delivery date Jul 23rd 32,345 AD
Not sure why, but I found it amusing when they said that the antimatter "reached speeds of over 40 km/hour." Not sure what the speeds are at the point of its creation (there are knowledgeable folks on here who will know, I'm sure), but that must seem sloooooow in comparison.
The point was that the van driving around with the containment device reached 40mph and this establishes that the containment device can handle a bit of rattling around
They only had regular Protons in it for this test though. The point was to see if the Protons were still there after the 40 mph journey in a van
The anti proton was very fast, but it needs to capture a positron to become an antimatter hydrogen atom. This happens after the anti proton was slowed down.
one of the most interesting of antimatter experiments is that if they somehow showed antimatter only experience 60% gravity, that will be huge. (earlier result of measuring antimatter’s gravity showed they don’t posses antigravity, but they seems to experiences less gravity. I guess a dedicated follow up experiment will likely get better measurement on whether antimatter indeed experience less gravity.)
This is incorrect. The only measurement of antimatter gravity so far by ALPHA-g resulted in no difference to normal matter within the experimental uncertainty [1]. This is not surprising, since any difference would violate conservation of energy.
Antimater has positively charged electrons (positrons) and negatively charged protons (antiprotons). Its neutrons are antineutrons made of a positron and antiproton.
So just the charges are swapped around.
Charges interact with electric fields.
Gravity is related to mass. It doesn't matter whether the bulk of the mass comes from negatively or positively charged particles.
Of course, antimatter has opposite electrical attraction. If an antimatter plastic comb attracts antimatter styrofoam crumbs, those crumbs will be repelled by the matter plastic comb (luckily for them).
I'm not an expert but, E=MC², so take the weight what they're moving around, multiply it by the speed of light squared, that's the amount of joules of energy you have, assuming perfect conversion.
It doesn't say how much material they moved though. If it was exactly 1 gram and they cancelled each other out perfectly (according to a quora answer, I refuse to trust AI but a random internet commenter is fine lmao), you've got 2 grams of mass converted to energy which is 180 terajoules or about 43 kilotons, which is about equivalent to 3 Hiroshima bombs.
Punching that into https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ gives a blast radius (of window destroying power) of 5.79 kilometers, or just over 100 km² of affected area.
Yeah. I bet in practice the liquid helium used to cool the trap is more dangerous than the actual antimater. It can cause cryogenic burns similar to frostbite, and if it suddenly boils off in a confined space (like inside a container or the back of a truck) it can displace oxygen and cause inert gas asphyxiation.
Of course both of these can be managed easily with appropriate procedures.
It is a bit like getting injured by pinching your hand in the hinge of the Velociraptor container in Jurrassic park. Not the first danger you would think of, but still present.
That exponent is still a lot larger than I would've expected for something measured in three digits of atoms. I thought it would've been in the double negative digits.
What you really need here is a zero point energy stabilized meta-material lattice that interacts with matter the same way as it does antimatter, since it's a structure composed of the lowest form of energy. It can manage the boundary between them. That would make it a lot less energy intensive to transport antimatter.
Hopefully enough to afford another specially commissioned landscape by acclaimed painter Vincent van Gogh or a signed first edition by revered scriptwriter William Shakespeare
> If the delivery can be made successfully—and it appears we are just a liquid helium supply away from getting it to work—the new facility in Germany should allow measurements with a precision of over 100 times better than anything that has been achieved at CERN.
Hmm. It sounds good until you realize that's two decimal places. Two decimal places is a pretty marginal gain for a lot of work.
ugh... Needing more than 4 significant digits is a pretty baseline requirement for precision physics experiments meant to falsify various candidate theories. 2 new significant digits is a vast parameter space that now can be excluded.
Needing more than 4 significant digits happens to be crucially important for mundane boring stuff like the GPS navigation in your maps app working.
Also, the amount of antimatter storable in a Penning Trap is limited such that its mass energy is comparable to the stored magnetic energy of the trap, which is small compared to the energy released by the same mass (as of the trap) of high explosives.
There was a time that was said about nukes. They didn't really make sense. We were only able to make minuscule amounts of U-235 / Plutonium at very high cost... and had we wanted evil bombs, we had a thousand ways already to make them.
Didn't stop people then. And it won't stop sufficiently criminal governments today.
I'm not saying we already have nukes in the sense that will stop people from wanting a better bomb. I'm saying we already have a much better bomb than antimatter so why would people invest in making a much shittier bomb?
And we don't even have to reach for nukes. Dynamite is also a better choice for blowing things up than antimatter.
Look up comparative damage stats for Tokyo and Hiroshima/Nagasaki in WWII. The nukes were nothing compared to firebombing.
Now do the same for Gaza and anywhere other than WWII Warsaw. Carpet bombing isn’t necessary if you can aim with precision at the support infrastructure of occupied structures.
You're making my point: We had comparatively worse and cheaper ways to butcher each others. And yet, we build nuclear bombs.
Carpet bombing is not meant for eliminating military targets - it's an act of state-sponsored terrorism to get a population to rise against its leaders. Only, it has been proven over and over again: That doesn't work and often results in the exact opposite, making them rally behind the flag against the barbarous enemy who would attack civilians. Which is why we stopped doing that. Mostly.
Energy. Creating a single anti-hydrogen atom requires an absurd amount of energy to first create a collision in a particle accelerator and then capture that anti-hydrogen before it eliminates against another atom.
Only about 0.01% of the energy used to operate the particle collider creates antimatter, the vast majority of which is impossible to capture. All in all, the efficiency of the entire process - if you were to measure it in the e^2=(pc)^2+(mc^2)^2 sense - is probably on the order of 1e-9 or worse.
Has there been research on more efficient ways to generate antiprotons? (By the way anti-hydrogen isn't how you would store it as anti-hydrogen can't be trapped.)
Nothing we do creates it at any kind of scale, and it's a pain in the ass to store.
Not to mention the only way to create it is with energy (it doesn't exist on Earth), and we can only do so at terrible efficiencies. So even theoretically it's pretty bad.
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