Producing antimatter

[Drunkrobot]

Antimatter, the goto sci-fi fuel, has a very high potential of changing our lives for the better. Housing an extremely large amount of energy in a tiny package, a matter/antimatter annihilation could potentially liberate 1000 times the possible energy released from today's fission reactions. Applications from treating cancers to fueling starships have been talked about ad infinitum.

Now, if only we could actually bottle some of that lightning.

What do you think the human race could do if it was totally dedicated towards producing as much AM as possible? Personally, I think the solar system has a little too much of "Planet Mercury" and too little of "orbital solar power stations and particle accelerators", so I would start there.

[SargeRho]

The "cheapest" way would probably be giant magnetic traps orbiting within Jupiter's radiation belts.

Or giant lasers used in pair production. There's a concept for an antimatter powered probe that enters a low-ish orbit around a star, unfolds enormous solar pannels, and then uses lasers to produce antimatter fuel. It then travels to another star, does lots of science, and repeats the same antimatter production process.

[Scotius]

To create huge amount of antimatter you have to use a lot of energy. It makes AM more energy-transfer medium than power source. And it's hellishly dangerous. IMHO humanity will be better off with fusion as primary source of energy.

[MrZayas1]

There are a few problems with anti-matter as we know today, and let me expound on this if you will! Anti-matter is known of and derived from magnetic and gravitational fields. A really cool thing is that scientists have created it before! But the problem is they used so much energy (A LOT) that it would be literally impractical at this time, considering the fact that we are barely able to send sattelites to jupiter, let alone send an antimatter collector. Even after the scientific experiment, they could produce less than a gram of antimatter! Crazy right? Right now we are pretty good on propulsion systems, but finances are low. Honestly i would think that in efforts such as space programs, that our world would be able to put aside petty disagreements, and financial cost, for the gain of humanity, honestly i would do it! But guess what, no one will because they have deep pockets and want to keep it that way!

[SargeRho]

Matter and Antimatter are the same thing, exept with reversed charges (Positrons are positive and Antiprotons are negative). We know how to produce it, in fact, we use positrons on a regular basis. PET scans work by injecting a positron-emitting radionuclide into the bloodstream and tracking the gamma ray pairs produced as those positrons annihilate with electrons. We also know how to trap antimatter, hell, we've made anti-atoms. Namely, anti-hydrogen.

It may be possible to create a magnetically bound hydrogen-analog called positronium, consisting of an electron and a positron, to allow for easiert storage.

[KerbMav]

To create huge amount of antimatter you have to use a lot of energy. It makes AM more energy-transfer medium than power source. And it's hellishly dangerous. IMHO humanity will be better off with fusion as primary source of energy.

Exactly. Like using solar power to charge a car - with a very small, energy-packed and volatile battery that is.

It may only be viable - like in Star Trek - as fuel for something very power hungry.

[SargeRho]

Well, it IS only viable as fuel, not as energy source, as producing antimatter eats more energy than you get back out of annihilating antimatter. But as such, it's epic.

[TheSaint]

I think it's highly likely that we'll be using anti-matter as a fuel in the future. Remember, as others have said, it isn't an energy source in-and-of itself, it is instead a way to take a larger energy source and use it to produce a fuel that is lightweight and compact. We will need a few breakthroughs. We'll need to have industrial-scale fusion reactors in order to produce the energy necessary. Room-temperature super-conductors would probably help out a lot as well. The process would be breathtakingly hazardous, so fully-automated facilities in very isolated locations would be required.

Although producing anti-matter is currently inefficient and expensive, part of the reason is because of the folks that are producing it. It is currently being produced by physicists for scientific study. So the accelerators and associated equipment are designed to produce a wide variety of small, tightly-controlled reactions under varying conditions. If you were to instead take a group of industrial engineers and have them design a facility for the sole purpose of producing large numbers of anti-protons, it would probably look a lot different and be much more efficient.