Plans for antimatter

Plans for antimatter
Congratulations to 12-year-old Austin Ellsworth on his fun model of a linear accelerator (symmetry, Mar 2007). However, using antimatter for fueling spaceships or energy storage, as in Dan Brown's book Angels and Demons, will never happen.

Fermilab is now the only place in the world to make and collect antiprotons. Going flat out we are able to collect about 5 trillion per day, to inject into the Tevatron collider. Capturing even a few of these in a "magnetic bottle" is extremely hard, but suppose we could capture all of them. If we then let them annihilate with matter, and converted the resulting energy into electricity with 100% efficiency, we could light up a 60-watt bulb for 25 seconds. The power bill to do that would be about 50 megawatts for a day!

So antimatter bombs or antimatter-powered spaceships have absolutely no scientific foundation, unless we could suck them through a wormhole from a parallel antimatter universe! (I am not serious about that!)

Mike Albrow, Fermilab

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