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Science

Can Antimatter Be Generated in a Lab? (popularmechanics.com) 83

"An international team of physicists have come up with a way to generate antimatter in the lab," reports Popular Mechanics, theoretically "allowing them to recreate conditions that are similar to those near a neutron star." This setup, at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) research laboratory in Germany, involves two high-intensity laser beams that can generate a jet of antimatter, as outlined in a paper published earlier this summer in the journal Communications Physics. That could make antimatter-based research far more accessible for scientists around the world...

it's tremendously difficult to recreate a neutron star's extreme conditions in terms of the science and logistics — imagine if a sugar cube weighed as much as Mount Everest in your laboratory! Two, scientists want to make antimatter for further analysis in the lab... So how did the researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf figure out how to generate antimatter? They're using opposing lasers in a setup they're referring to as a laser pincer... There's a tiny piece of plastic that both lasers shoot toward. As the lasers destroy the plastic, they send clouds of electrons toward each other... By smashing particles together between two lasers, scientists can begin to approach the intensely concentrated gravity and matter of a neutron star...

In this case, scientists are still speculating that the laser pincers will work, with support from a computer simulation that has helped them test and confirm their theory. Now, the next step is to begin building the rig that will really fire the lasers. "[C]olleagues are developing a platform that can be used to experimentally test whether the magnetic fields actually form as our simulations predict," HZDR physicist Toma Toncian says.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Third Position for submitting the article!
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Can Antimatter Be Generated in a Lab?

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Since like 1955.

  • This sounds like it could go very, very wrong.
    • Is that because you get your fears from speculative movies written by non-scientists instead of scientific journals and evidence-based logic?

      • by jred ( 111898 )
        I wouldn't call them fears, but definitely concerns. I also don't study gravity, but if you told me you created an anti-gravity pack and you were going to test it by jumping off a bridge I could see how that would go very wrong.
    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday September 25, 2021 @05:29PM (#61832135)

      This sounds like it could go very, very wrong.

      If you took all the anti-matter that humanity has ever created and converted it all into pure energy, you would barely have enough to heat a cup of tea.

      • by jred ( 111898 )
        Now they think they've come up with a way to create it fairly easily, assuming the simulations are correct. Moderation is key. Drinking a glass of water won't kill you. Drinking gallons will.
        • Now they think they've come up with a way to create it fairly easily, assuming the simulations are correct. Moderation is key. Drinking a glass of water won't kill you. Drinking gallons will.

          It does not take gallons of water to kill a person. All they have to do is drink ONE gallon in a very short period of time. Chug it. And they are in extreme danger, especially if they are already impaired or don't realize the danger. Innocent people competing in water-chugging contests have died from it.

          There was an infamous case when the Wii game console launched and was hard to obtain where a mom with kids entered a water-chugging contest with the Wii being the prize for the winner. It was a urine jo

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            Notably there was a bit of medical mis-adventure involved as well. Here kidneys all but shut down in a somewhat rare over-reaction to nausea and she absorbed all of the water in part because of a strong ability to resist nausea.

            Without the reaction, or if she had gone ahead and vomited, she would have been OK.

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          It's not really much of a worry. Necessarily, the total energy released from the positrons annihilating with electrons cannot exceed the energy input into the system in the first place. You'll want some shielding from the generated gamma, but that's true of any gamma source.

      • If you took all the anti-matter that humanity has ever created and converted it all into pure energy, you would barely have enough to heat a cup of tea.

        Yes, but how big would a pile of bananas need to be to generate that much energy through radioactive decay in a fortnight? Not everyone understands what a cup of tea is like.

        • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday September 25, 2021 @07:48PM (#61832409)

          Yes, but how big would a pile of bananas need to be to generate that much energy through radioactive decay in a fortnight?

          A cup of tea is 250 grams and is warmed from 20C to 100C. So that is 250*80 = 2000 calories = 8370 joules.

          The anti-matter emited by K-40 in a banana produces 9e-18 watts of power [wired.com].

          A fortnight is 14*24*3600 = 1209600 seconds.

          So you would need 8370 / (9e-18 * 1209600) = 768,849,206,349,206 bananas.

      • enough to heat a "cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea"
      • This sounds like it could go very, very wrong.

        If you took all the anti-matter that humanity has ever created and converted it all into pure energy, you would barely have enough to heat a cup of tea.

        What about something "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea?"

      •   a cup of cold tea
        without milk or sugar
        or tea

    • Keep your safety glasses on, those are real lasers!

      Also, splattering burnt plastic. Probably smells awful in that lab.

  • We have already created anti hydrogen [home.cern] at the CERN laboratory.
  • by Jaegs ( 645749 ) on Saturday September 25, 2021 @07:10PM (#61832357) Homepage Journal

    ...but you need to first create an anti-lab.

  • So, if it pans out they have a method of converting matter into energy.
    Even if they get some piddling % efficiency it should be way in the black with regards to energy in and energy out.
    I'd suggest watch this space!
  • by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday September 25, 2021 @08:04PM (#61832417)

    A great question to ask on slashdot, I'm sure all the Nobel prize winners and eminent physicists in our community will provide the correct answer.

  • by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Saturday September 25, 2021 @08:16PM (#61832433)
    They are talking about making positrons, not anti-hydrogen. Labs have made positrons for decades - SLAC where I work had a positron source that ran 24/7 generating about 10^12 positrons / second. Making anti-protons is much harder but Fermilab did that decades ago ( not sure which lab was first). CERN now makes full anti-Hydrogen atoms - which is a whole lot more difficult. See https://www.slac.stanford.edu/... [stanford.edu] from 1988 on the SLAC positron source.

    This experiment is generating positrons from photon-photon collisions, but even that isn't new, SLAC experiment E-144 https://www.slac.stanford.edu/... [stanford.edu] did that in the late 90s.

    This experiment isn't using accelerators, but that there are positron emitting isotopes that can be used in any lab and don't need accelerators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    BTW - I'm listing SLAC experiments because I'm familiar with the, but I don't know if any of them were the first demonstration of their kind and I am not claiming that they are

    The extremely high optical fields they are generating may be unique and it may be a new mechanism for generating positrons -I'd need to read very carefully to be sure. ELI does very good work - it just bugs me when articles like the above imply something far more extrordinary than actually happened. Science moves in lots of small steps
    • "scientists are still speculating that the laser pincers will work"

    • Well I make $2 quadrillion per eon working at SLACC. The Standard Linear Accelerator Cock Cannon. It shoots roosters. Standardized roosters.
    • And the original scientific paper has absolutely nothing to do with neutron stars (except for a single bibliographical reference in the introduction). Typical pseudo-journalist sensationalism.

    • Thank you for that information, I found it interesting.
    • Labs have made positrons for decades

      And Nature has been doing it since time immemorial.

      The discovery of positrons in 1935(+/-) was from a cosmic ray impact in a balloon-born cloud chamber surrounded by a magnet, where (IIRC) an incoming proton (one sense of curvature, one mass, one radius of curvature) entered the within-chamber plate, and kicked out a particle which travelled with the curvature radius appropriate to an electron's mass-charge ratio, but the same curvature sense as the incoming proton. He

  • Yes, it can (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ElizabethGreene ( 1185405 ) on Saturday September 25, 2021 @10:29PM (#61832585)

    It's fairly trivial to generate positrons (antielectrons) in the lab by radioactive decay of carbon-11, potassium-40,nitrogen-13, oxygen-15, aluminium-26, sodium-22, fluorine-18, or iodine-121. The last time I looked United Nuclear had a sodium positron source as a stock item.

  • Better start looking for dilithium crystals.

    • Can Dilithium crystals be grown in a lab?
      • Dilithium - the Li2 molecule - may be present in lithium gas - which needs temperatures above about 1000 K. But when lithium condenses to as liquid or solid the bonding electrons dissociate from individual atoms into a conduction band - the mark of a metallic solid. I've not heard of any solid phase compound which incorporates a dilithium entity. I'd hesitate to say it was impossible, just that I've never heard of it, and I suspect the Trekkies would have howled at the moon if someone published on it.
  • Containing it, isolating it, IIRC is the bigger challenge.

    • Separating it is easy though. In a magnetic field, always flies off in the opposite direction from normal matter.
      After that, you can just treat it like normal matter with an opposite polarity that isn't allowed to touch any (normal matter) walls. Again, magnets are your friend here.
      If you get it to form actual atoms and molecules, it gets really easy to handle, As easy as keeping a ball of some stuff hovering somewhere.
      Of course implying you put it underground to protect it from cosmic rays.

      Making it in big

  • Creating anti-matter has been rather routine for about half a century. What kind of an idiotic post is this?

  • The submission wasn't. Because everybody here knows it can and was.

    And the story wasn't about that, but about making it in nice large quantities.
    And about how the principle is really nice and elegant and how it should be. (If you want anti-matter, you need to start with light, and let it split into matter and anti-matter. You put a lot of energy in, because merging it again will give you a *lot* of energy back. Nukes are a joke compared to matter-antimatter-"annihilation".)

  • If you meet someone from another planet and he holds out his left hand, don’t shake it. He might be made of antimatter. You would both disappear in a tremendous flash of light.

    • by rossdee ( 243626 )

      The alien would have to be in a vacuum. otherwise the atmosphere would be reacting before you got to touch

    • What if she (the alien) has 3 tentacles to choose from? Do you think she would have the same cultural preferences as you?

      See also : nose rubbing, penis shaking and other greeting rituals used by anatomically modern human males.

  • by Kazymyr ( 190114 ) on Sunday September 26, 2021 @07:32AM (#61833429) Journal

    There's a very easy way to generate antimatter in your garage, basement or backyard. Heck, many people are probably doing it already without knowing it.
    Go to Home Depot and buy a bag of potassium chloride water softener. Put it in your garage. There, you have antimatter. On a small scale you can do the same by buying at a grocery store a box of low sodium salt substitute, which also has potassium chloride in it.
    If you don't believe me, take a Geiger counter and put it next to the bag of potassium chloride, and enjoy its clicking. I get around 60cpm, which is around 4 times the natural background in my location. Those are 511keV gamma rays resulting from the annihilation of positrons emitted by the K-40 isotope, which is a small but universal percentage of potassium anywhere in the universe.

    • At this very moment, I have a banana in a bag with some pears, using positrons to help ripen them. People keep saying ethylene, but we know it's really banana positrons.
  • If it is so easy, just by pointing two opposing lasers at a tiny piece of plastic, why have we not seen this announced by the National Ignition Facility (NIF)?
  • Submission's title was 'Lab Generated Antimatter', not 'Can Antimatter Be Generated in a Lab?'.

    Looks like trolling.
  • ...poster is clearly an idiot. Can we ban them from article submission?

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