Antimatter bullets....oh the potential

Currently we are making antimatter 1 atom at a time; its been said that a gram could cause some SERIOUS damage to the earth (It converts to 100% energy). I was thinking, what if they were able to implement this stuff in bullets? Imagine that, a 2 inch bullet having the power to blow up a damn tank!

How would you make the bullet? After all, when matter and antimatter collide they annihilate one another.

Can you just gently set antimatter down on matter and avoid total annihilation?

reply to post by Acelet


if it converts to pure energy i dont think you would use it to take out a tank. you would probably take out a whole city with one bullet of antimatter.

i for one am glad it is taking them one atom at a time.

see the problem of using antimatter bullets, is that you'd have to contain the antimatter. That means insulated tubes of supercooled liquid, lots of cables, etc. for the magnetic field... if you see where I am going with this, then you will also realize that it is much more economically feasible to just take that same mass in steel and lob it towards your foe (him not being in my sight) in the shape of a giant artillery shell.
namen.

ya its impractical

thats why we should focus more on beam technology

like , Ion blasters

if you could lob a gram of antimatter at something it would be very powerful, on the order of 20 kilotons yield. Getting antimatter contained inside something bullet-sized is unlikely though, barring radical changes in the way antimatter is stored. Also the stuff is incredibly difficult and expensive to make, on the order of quadrillions of dollars a gram over billions of years at current prices.

We already have nuclear weapons that fit in artillery shells, and nuclear artillery shells have been tested all the way down to 155mm, though I don't think any that size were ever produced in numbers.

reply to post by mdiinican


Antimatter's destructive power is highly over-rated, folks. I blame Star Trek, and other space opera for it. Just for fun, let's run some numbers, shall we?

The famous (or infamous) relation that we're looking for is E=mc^2. In standard units, Energy is measured in Joules, mass in kilograms, and c is in meters per second. So, the energy released by conversion of a gram of antimatter would be E= 0.002 * 89,875,517,873,681,764 = 179,751,035,747,363.5 joules.

TNT has an energy density of 4.6 megajoules / kilogram, so, dividing the joules released by 4,600,000 (correcting the unit magnitude) gives 39,076.3 kg of TNT equivalent.

Admittedly, that's a hell of a bang out of 2 grams of input (1g antimatter, and the 1g of matter it takes with it), but it's three orders of magnitude less than 20,000 tons. If you want both sides in Kt, that would be 0.004Kt.

Sorry...the physics geek in me couldn't resist

We have yet to create an amount of antimatter REMOTELY CLOSE to a gram. We also have yet to successfully contain antimatter before it reacts with surrounding matter to release energy.

Originally posted by Brother Stormhammer
reply to post by mdiinican

 

Antimatter's destructive power is highly over-rated, folks. I blame Star Trek, and other space opera for it. Just for fun, let's run some numbers, shall we?

The famous (or infamous) relation that we're looking for is E=mc^2. In standard units, Energy is measured in Joules, mass in kilograms, and c is in meters per second. So, the energy released by conversion of a gram of antimatter would be E= 0.002 * 89,875,517,873,681,764 = 179,751,035,747,363.5 joules.

TNT has an energy density of 4.6 megajoules / kilogram, so, dividing the joules released by 4,600,000 (correcting the unit magnitude) gives 39,076.3 kg of TNT equivalent.

Admittedly, that's a hell of a bang out of 2 grams of input (1g antimatter, and the 1g of matter it takes with it), but it's three orders of magnitude less than 20,000 tons. If you want both sides in Kt, that would be 0.004Kt.

Sorry...the physics geek in me couldn't resist

I checked again; your math is wrong somewhere. By E=mc^2, 1 gram of matter is equivalent to about 9x10^13 joules which is roughly equivalent to the energy released by 21.5 kilotons of TNT. Now of course, a gram of antimatter will also annihilate a gram of matter, doubling this, but much of the energy will be released in neutrinos and won't really do anything towards exploding things.

A kilogram of TNT would release about 20-30 megatons of explosive force, not beyond the capabilities of modern nuclear weapons, but certainly from a smaller package, if you don't consider the no doubt building-sized amount of equipment it would take to hold the stuff; something we can't currently do.

reply to post by mdiinican


Whoops, the last paragraph should read

"A kilogram of antimatter would release about 20-30 megatons of explosive force"

not

"A kilogram of TNT would release about 20-30 megatons of explosive force".

Obviously a kilogram of TNT would release a kilogram TNT equivalent explosive force. Too late to edit.

This matter on antimatter weapons is actually quite intruiging. I started researching possible antimatter weapons after finishing the first book of the sten chronicles. All the needed "stuff" is there, all we really need is an efficiant.method of antimatter production. All the scientists at CERN have created so far are antparticles, though I have heard they are trying to link the particles together. A bullet 1mm small , with protection, and the antimatter particle would have the explosive capapility that is tiny, but would create a large fallout explosion and a lethal EMP burst. The bullet could consist of a hollow but powerful 1mm magnetic substance that would contain in a vacuum a small amount of antimatter. In further thinking I found that the way to get the matter to impact with antimatter is to get the bullet to shatter on impact, but the method of propulsion we use today ( gunpowder ) will shatter that bullet in the barrel, killing the operator. A way around this is to use a new form of propulsion like a laser or magnetic field propulsion similar to maglev trains. As these projectiles are so small, you would be able to fit hundreds, if not thousands of these in regular sized gun magazines. A single one of these projectiles would be able to kill a man with the explosion alone, never mind the EMP pulse a sudden appearance of such a amount of pure energy is sure to create. A single soldier would be able to destroy tanks, APC's, planes and cars with as little as one projectile, blowing off tracks, turrets, wings and wheels as well as disabling them with the electromagnetic pulses. Credit for the original idea goes to Chris Bunch and his imagination in his book "Sten". Antimatter research goes to the CERN official site. Post on how to defend against the possibilities of this technology shall probably follow soon.

WELCOME to the Great Earth Game Show Contest of "Who can blow each other up the best?"

And the winner is... Oh wait, no one's alive anymore. Moving on to Mars!

Seriously, that's scary. Imagine a tank destroying a city... Or worse, terrorists getting their hands on the stuff... *shudders*

uhm, no ones proved anti-matter exists, theres just a theory that it should exist, and youre talking about making bullets out of it?
regular bullets kill just fine, speculating about super bullets that kill 10x better, well...i dont know what to say to that : /

reply to post by Brother Stormhammer


Taken directly from Cern:

Does one gram of antimatter contain the energy of a 20 kilotonne nuclear bomb?

Twenty kilotonnes of TNT is the equivalent of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The explosion of a kilotonne (=1000 tonnes) of TNT corresponds to a energy release of 4.2x10^12 joules (10^12 is a 1 followed by 12 zeros, i.e. a million million). For comparison, a 60 watt light bulb consumes 60 J per second.

You are probably asking for the explosive release of energy by the sudden annihilation of one gram of antimatter with one gram of matter. Let's calculate it.

To calculate the energy released in the annihilation of 1 g of antimatter with 1 g of matter (which makes 2 g = 0.002 kg), we have to use the formula E=mc2, where c is the speed of light (300,000,000 m/s):

E= 0.002 x (300,000,000)2 kg m2/s2 = 1.8 x 10^14 J = 180 x 10^12 J. Since 4.2x10^12 J corresponds to a kilotonne of TNT, then 2 g of matter-antimatter annihilation correspond to 180/4.2 = 42.8 kilotonnes, about double the 20 kt of TNT.

This means that you ‘only’ need half a gram of antimatter to be equally destructive as the Hiroshima bomb, since the other half gram of (normal) matter is easy enough to find.


Link

Okay, so how quickly would an anti-mater bullet explode? When it comes in contact with regular matter, wont the resulting blast repel surrounding matter, delaying further reactions? Maybe an anti-matter bullet will only fizzle, surrounded by its own protective vacuum sheath.

reply to post by neonitus


Antimatter is a real thing. It even has everyday uses in medical positron emission tomography scanners and some methods of radiography for scanning structures like bridges for faults. Antimatter was first theorized as we know it in 1928 by Paul Dirac and discovered in 1932 by Carl D Anderson.

reply to post by thisguyrighthere


I suppose if you could make some sort of miniaturized penning trap and found a way to fire it out of a rifle (maybe a magnetic one?), it would destroy the trap upon impact and the anti-matter would collide with the matter around it.


reply to post by neonitus


Just because something is a theory doesn't mean it doesn't exist, open your mind. Gravity is also a theory of sorts, but when you drop a duce it always hits the water right?

Antimatter appears in large quantities at the edge of Earths atmosphere and above electrical storms.