Are there any actual sources on feasible antimatter production? Currently it's a byproduct of experiments not related to it, so the energy to matter conversion efficiency is insanely low. If we focused our energy on antimatter production, how high could we get? Any scientific works on that? Is more than 1% possible?
The THEORETICAL maximum is 50%, since the process inevitably produces equal quantities of antimatter and matter. However, you also need to get the input energy from somewhere, which means overall it's really a matter --> energy --> antimatter conversion process. And even if the energy --> antimatter step can reach that theoretical 50% efficiency, the matter --> energy step will be much lower. Apart from matter annihilation (which requires antimatter in the first place, so it's useless here) the best way to convert matter to energy is with fusion reactions, which are only ~1% efficient (it depends on the actual elements/isotopes being fused, but tends to be around 1%). So, the overall conversion efficiency cannot ever be better than 0.5%, i.e. 200 kilograms of matter to produce 1 kilogram of antimatter. And that's only if we get fusion to work and can somehow reach the theoretical 50% efficiency in energy to antimatter production.
>>7663362
Wut is going on in your pic? Look up space based antimatter harvesting
>>7663415
>>7663427
I'm talking about nuclear or orbital solar -> electricity - > antimatter. I want to take a 1TW power plant and make antimatter with it. With CERN I'd get perhaps a few million atoms or antiprotons, but their main goal is research, not industrial production, so there has to be a huge window for optimisation.
1% efficiency combined with large nuclear plants would allow commercial use for antimatter.
>>7663462
What uses do you envision for it? The only thing antimatter has going for it is energy density (which is really only useful for spacecraft propulsion and a handful of other uses, none of which are really in demand right now). Since it doesn't occur naturally in meaningful quantities, it's not a fuel, it's an energy storage medium. And for most applications ordinary batteries would be a better choice.
>>7663475
Literally only thing it's useful for (and you mentioned it): rocket fuel. For all near earth (even solar system wide) uses it makes the rocket equation invalid because of its ridiculous energy density. Combined with Elon reusable rockets concept it could be very important for space expansion. While I realise that fuel cost isn't a big factor in overall launch cost, an antimatter powered Saturn V clone could carry 1000+ tons instead of 150, lowering $/kg cost which would in turn allow for more demand to be created. Some back of the napkin calculations give, with today unimaginable 1% efficiency, a ridiculously cheap 20-50 million per gram of antimatter with which you can do a couple of LEO launches. You need 10 gram for a trip to Mars in one month. It makes some things more accessible.
Of course there are plenty of other issues, but you can't solve them without a ready access to large quantities of antimatter.
>>7663492
And that basically means there's not going to be much of a market for antimatter until we find a really good reason to go to other planets.
>>7663462
Just jarvest the antimatter lel. There are belts of antiprotons around earth and gas planets
>>7663544
>gas planets
And how do you propose we get there to harvest it without antimatter?
>>7663536
We can agree that lowering the cost of launching a kg into orbit by an order of magnitude would at least somewhat increase the demand for it (more and better satellites, less constrained by mass, for example)? Not to mention that companies who would provide that would make a lot of money.
>>7663544
>Just jarvest the antimatter lel. There are belts of antiprotons around earth and gas planets
Your body emits 180 positrons per hour from radioactive potassium, doesn't mean it's practical. It's even less efficient than CERN.
>>7663492
>because of its ridiculous energy density
I think you meant "ridiculously low." Antimatter has one of the worst energy densities of any known fuel, hands-down. Everything you gain in the amount of energy released from each particle is lost twice over in the extremely bulky containment device. For instance, it's not actually possible for the Penning traps currently used to hold more than 0.7 joules of positrons without the containment field taking more energy than the antimatter would release.
>>7663550
Well how did galileo and cassini get to saturn and jupiter? HINT: they did not employ antimatter
>>7663582
Antimatter itself has the highest energy density known to science. Matter/Antimatter reactions can theoretically approach 100% of E=MC^2, but even fusion can only get 1%. Antimatter is not a power source since it must be manufactured, and manufacturing is quite inefficient, but its useful for space travel where you can't afford to bring heavy weight with you.
>>7663590
Did they have enough payload capacity and fuel to take antimatter harvesting equipment there and then bring the antimatter back to Earth?
>>7663603
>Antimatter itself has the highest energy density known to science.
Yes, I know, but you can't use antimatter itself as a fuel on a matter-based spacecraft. You need antimatter and a container to hold the antimatter in.
With all currently known technology, this so massively limits the density at which you can store antimatter that it becomes strictly worse, in energy-density terms, than any other fuel. There are speculative ways to store antimatter at higher densities, but they're *very* speculative, and many would require fundamentally new forms of antimatter production to start with in the first pace. (Not just more efficient production, but ways to produce much cooler, lower-energy antimatter.).
>>7663582
>>7663616
All of those are challenges that need to be overcome. The technology is in its infancy so it's dumb to look at the future in the light of the present. Biggest challenge to antimatter research today is lack of antimatter, while you can speculate about ways of containing it, you need to actually work with it to test your theories.
About antimatter rockets - in any case size of the container will grow almost linearly (well, still exponentially but very very slightly so) with the amount of antimatter instead of current exponential. You'd need the mass of container and propulsion system to be over a thousand tons for it to have less energy density than classical rockets. It won't.
What about terraforming Mars with antimatter? If we had a large solar array in space and high efficiency we could ramp up the production to a couple of tenths of a gram per day. Just detonating it on Mars poles gives you a lot of energy without the radiation and shit ton of CO2. Bonus points, you could sculpt the surface in any way you want.
>>7663603
Well you tell me: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/superconductor-and-antimatter-bootstrap.html?m=1
Antimatter isn't the only way to delta V stuff around you know
>>7663603
>Antimatter itself has the highest energy density known to science. Matter/Antimatter reactions can theoretically approach 100% of E=MC^2
This is true... but also not entirely true. You can put more energy into a smaller package by just making it go really fast.
Any speck of matter moving at 0.866 c has a kenetic energy equal to its rest mass, which, like finding the energy of some mass of antimatter, is also determined by e = mc^2
Above 0.866 c, then, it has more.
It would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a single atom of carbon to the speed of light. There is not enough energy in the universe to do it. But this fundimental limitation on matter's speed also means you can store an arbitrarily large amount of energy in any fast-moving speck of matter.
It's not a very practical way of storing energy, because anything going that fast will not want to change direction, and so storing it locally becomes a problem, but if your goal is merely to release a terrible amount of energy on some target, there is no theoretical limit to the punch a relativistic bomb can pack. You can always double the amount of energy you expend accelerating your projectile, and raise its velocity incrementally closer to lightspeed.
>>7664465
It sounds even less practical than using antimatter as a fuel. You need a way to precisely dispense exact amounts of energy at the exact time. I'm not sure how would you do that with a relativistic particle flywheel. You'd need a enormous ship with particle accelerator rings to hold the stuff. Antimatter isn't easy either, but at least you can cool down and bottle it into a relatively compact storage.
Do you have any links where this is discussed or was that just for the sake of the argument?
>>7664539
Just for the sake of arguement.
Reletivistic weapons interest me, as does the idea that you can store absoltely any amount of energy in any old hunk of matter, provided you can manage to use that energy to accelerate the matter.
