Antiparticles

pacquiao

Atom smashers, like CERN only produce one or two picograms of antiprotons each year. A picogram is a trillionth of a gram. All of the antiprotons produced at CERN in one year would be enough to light a 100-watt electric light bulb for three seconds.
What exactly is holding them back in producing 1 gram?

krd

pacquiao wrote: »

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What exactly is holding them back in producing 1 gram?

Because it would mean a bigger mess.

They're trying to measure something. Not produce something. And what they're trying to measure is very very small. And doesn't weigh much.

They're not actually making anything. They're accelerating particles very fast, smashing them into pieces to see what they're made of.

Like taking a pocket watch, and smashing it against a wall, and then figuring out what it's made of by the bits that go flying through the air.

seamus

Well if you think about it logically, if 2 picograms is enough to light a 100W bulb for 3 seconds, that's about 300 joules of energy.

So 1 gram would be 300 * 500,000,000,000 Joules, or 150,000,000,000,000 = 150 Terajoules. That's about 3 times the amount of energy released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Relatively speaking it doesn't sound like a lot, but you also have to consider that's just a gram of this stuff.

Storage safety problems aside, you don't get 150TJ for free. It would require a lot of energy to obtain this amount of antiparticles in the first place.

krd

seamus wrote: »

Storage safety problems aside, you don't get 150TJ for free. It would require a lot of energy to obtain this amount of antiparticles in the first place.

In other words; it would blow the **** out the accelerator.