Antimatter is not a very feasible working material for weapons because of the expense involved with it's manufacture. We can't make a perfect vacuum, so even in a vacuum chamber, and held in place with a magnetic bottle, stored antimatter will slowly annihilate with matter.

The production of antimatter can only be done using a particle accelerator. The kind of particle accelerator that is used in research are obviously not optimized for the task, and are incredibly inefficient. But even an optimized version would still be far below 1% efficiency. Essentially, it would take the energy of one hundred, or a thousand, or more nuclear bombs, in commercially available electricity, to make an antimatter bomb of the same yield. It would also take years and billions of dollars.

Using antimatter to make an antimatter-triggered fusion bomb is a better idea than having a straight antimatter bomb, but it's rather pointless. There's no particular need for smaller, lighter, drastically more expensive nuclear weapons. There are already ones that can be fired from cannons, or put on the tips of anti-air missiles, as far back as the 60s. The W-54 nuclear weapon was man-portable, in backpack form, and was capable of being launched off the back of a jeep with a recoilless rifle.

Antimatter has much more promise in space exploration. It would only take a few grams worth to make an antimatter triggered fusion engine that could send a probe to a nearby star.

lol Here's me thinking anti-matter and dark matter were the same thing !!!


Anti-matter is the opposite of matter
Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that doesn't emit or reflect enough magnetic radiation to be observed directly. (thanks wikipedia )

So to anwer your question, I don't really understand antimatter. I'm sure some theoretical physicist could theorize (lol).

Speaking of theorizing, imagine antimatter is being leaked into our matter universe from an antimatter universe. Thats a cool thought, ain't it?

Originally posted by trilateral
lol Here's me thinking anti-matter and dark matter were the same thing !!!


Anti-matter is the opposite of matter
Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that doesn't emit or reflect enough magnetic radiation to be observed directly. (thanks wikipedia )

So to anwer your question, I don't really understand antimatter. I'm sure some theoretical physicist could theorize (lol).

Speaking of theorizing, imagine antimatter is being leaked into our matter universe from an antimatter universe. Thats a cool thought, ain't it?

I wouldn't necessarily call antimatter the opposite of matter. It is, in almost all respects, very similar to regular matter. There are anti protons, anti neutrons, and positrons, which are direct equivalents to protons, neutrons, and electrons, except that they carry the opposite charge (except, of course, neutrons. Well, the negative of zero is still zero, but that's trivial).

Antimatter has ordinary mass and produces and is affected by regular gravity exactly the same as regular matter. Besides the fact that the antiparticles carry the opposite charge of their corresponding particle, the only other real notable thing about them is that they will annihilate their corresponding particle, releasing their combined mass worth of energy, in the form of gamma rays, which is of course, given by E=mc^2.

There could well be an antimatter universe, but we don't really know near enough to begin speculating on alternate universes. There is nothing known preventing antimatter galaxies from existing, but it's fairly certain that they don't, because an antimatter galaxy would be constantly giving off gamma rays as it traveled through the stray hydrogen in the near vacuum of the intergalactic medium. We don't see anything like that, so it's fairly certain that there are none.

It's really not known why there is so much more matter in the universe than antimatter. If the universe was all antimatter, it would probably be functionally similar to ours.

but at CERN's quote of $300 billion per milligram, I doubt it's going to be weaponized anytime soon.

Originally posted by trilateral
So to anwer your question, I don't really understand antimatter. I'm sure some theoretical physicist could theorize (lol).

It's not theoretical -- antimatter is used on a daily basis for things like PET scanning (PET = positiron emission tomography, a positron being an anti-electron).

Take space and think of it in two dimensions for this explanation. Assume that empty space is a thin sheet of colored plastic. Now create matter by using a hole punch and energy to make plastic circles....matter. If the plastic circles from the hole punch are matter, they can be seen when they are on the space layer. The holes are antimatter, also visible and identical to matter in size and shape. When a plastic circle is placed in a hole to make empty space, all the energy that was used to create it is released. Extend this analogy to three dimensions and consider E=mC^2. This is the 100% conversion explanation, not just differential masses of products and reactants.
If this explanation doesn't do it for you, blame P.A.M. Dirac, one of the giants of physics in the last century. He actually had a better wave equation than Schroedinger as he had allowed for a non-zero probability at nodes of wave functions.
That's about all I remember about this.

[edit on 12/12/2008 by pteridine]