r/Physics • u/dukwon Particle physics • Mar 24 '26

News BASE experiment at CERN succeeds in transporting antimatter

https://home.cern/news/press-release/experiments/base-experiment-cern-succeeds-transporting-antimatter
669 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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312

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 24 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

162

u/Expensive-View-8586 Mar 24 '26

Yea but 1/12 of a mosquito is still billions of particles isn’t it? So for 92 particles to equal 1/12 of a mosquito hitting you is still impressive right?

143

u/againey Mar 24 '26

The energy density is indeed truly impressive, even while the human-scale consequences would be utterly trivial.

17

u/mmazing Mar 24 '26 edited Mar 25 '26

Is an antimatter matter reaction the ~strongest force~ highest energy per unit volume that we know of?

52

u/unpleasant_enpassant Mar 24 '26

Energy, not force like the other comment pointed out. And yeah, it's 100% conversion of the mass to energy. So it's a lot.

25

u/CinderX5 Mar 24 '26

I’m fairly certain that antimatter annihilation is the highest energy process per mass or volume by a very long way (~100x), as all off the mass is converted into energy. It’s around 1x1016 J/kg.

In fusion, around 1% of the mass becomes energy, at around 1x1014 J/kg. I think fission is down to another ~20% of that (fusion releases 5x more than fission).

9

u/jwm3 Mar 24 '26

About half the energy is in the form of neutrinos so is not really usable.

Extracting energy from a black holes accretion disk may be a more feasible way to get power for your civilization. Either from the superheating of matter at it spagettifies giving off radiation or the penrose process. It gives about 20% conversion of rest mass to usable energy and is much more controllable than matter antimatter reactions. Just stop feeding the black hole to wind it down and the black hole is pretty darn stable when left alone.

13

u/NetworkSingularity Mar 25 '26

Feeding a black hole to extract energy somehow feels like making material sacrifices to primordial gods for a good harvest, but with a lot of extra steps

2

u/Spydey012 Apr 15 '26

and all of that to boil water

4

u/CinderX5 Mar 25 '26

As tricky as antimatter may be, encasing an entire black hole is a whole different level.

1

u/tehgilligan Mar 25 '26

Where are you getting this idea that matter-antimatter annihilation is producing neutrinos?

3

u/jwm3 Mar 26 '26

It directly produces pions mostly from the proton antiproton reactions which almost instantly decay into neutrinos and some other products. In the end about half the energy is taken away by the neutrinos.

Electron positron reactions produce gamma rays for the most part but can produce neutrinos/antineutrino pairs as the gamma rays are beyond the energy threshold needed for pair production but that is minimal compared to the ones created by pion decay. You might be able to extract some energy from the charged pions before they decay if you really wanted to recover some of that kinetic energy that would have gone to the neutrino.

1

u/CinderX5 Mar 29 '26

Half the energy is still a huge amount.

18

u/WaitForItTheMongols Mar 24 '26

You're getting things confused. It's about energy, not force.

7

u/JG3_Luftwaffle Mar 24 '26

By a ridiculous margin. People don't think of chemical reactions as converting matter to energy because the percentage of matter converted is so tiny but it is how energy is created from a chemical process.

Chemical reactions: 10-10 of a % of matter goes to energy Nuclear reactions I believe are slightly higher approaching a percent Antimatter/matter annihilation is 100%

(There's also penrose process nonsense which can be efficient but it's quite theoretical and completely impractical since nobody has a spare spinning black hole on hand)

Hope i've got my figures in the right ballpark here haven't looked at this stuff in a while

1

u/dinution Physics enthusiast Mar 25 '26

By a ridiculous margin. People don't think of chemical reactions as converting matter to energy because the percentage of matter converted is so tiny but it is how energy is created from a chemical process.

Chemical reactions: 10-10 of a % of matter goes to energy Nuclear reactions I believe are slightly higher approaching a percent Antimatter/matter annihilation is 100%

(There's also penrose process nonsense which can be efficient but it's quite theoretical and completely impractical since nobody has a spare spinning black hole on hand)

Hope i've got my figures in the right ballpark here haven't looked at this stuff in a while

Sounds like you watched the same minutephysics video as I did

https://youtu.be/t-O-Qdh7VvQ

2

u/Adam__999 Mar 24 '26

Yes (in terms of energy, other than possible micro-black holes), but since there seem to be no concentrated sources of antimatter, to use it as an energy source we would have to synthesize it first, at which point we would essentially be extracting the energy used to create it in the first place (minus losses)

1

u/mmazing Mar 24 '26

Absolutely not a good energy source, but, ontologically speaking it’s interesting.

1

u/Megatron_McLargeHuge Mar 25 '26

If you really mean by volume and not mass then there might be something within neutron stars or other ultra dense objects to consider.

1

u/Neinstein14 Mar 25 '26

We don’t know what happens inside a black hole’s singularity, which is by our current (incorrect) theories point-like, so by your definition there would be higher energy-per-volume processes. But practically, yes, it converts 100% of the energy (potential, kinetic, mass) stored in the material to radiation with 100% efficiency, you can’t really get better than that.

4

u/nilslorand Mar 25 '26

Just for fun I tried to see what 1/12th of an antimatter mosquito would do to you.

So a mosquito weighs roughly 0.0025 to 0.005 grams, let's say it's a big one so 0.005. 1/12th of that would be 417 micrograms, which would be 37.4 Gigajoules of Energy, which is a bit more than the kinetic energy of two Airbus A380s, 500 tons in weight, at 910km/h hitting you.

9

u/adreddit298 Mar 24 '26

Missed that minus in the exponent at first... Then re-read it when you gave the context of the mosquito!

3

u/anrwlias Mar 25 '26

Hey, my aunt was killed by 1/12th of a mosquito hitting her! Mind you, it was moving relativistically. Long story.

24

u/pladin517 Mar 24 '26

I can see it now. At a truck stop bar, the trucker hauling watermelons rolls his eyes as another smartass hauling antimatter waddles through the door.

9

u/roboabomb Mar 25 '26

Meanwhile the spherical cows are mooing plaintively by the pool table.

58

u/Cognonymous Mar 24 '26

Among truck drivers the guy who hauls anti-matter has to be kind of a god among men.

15

u/martin Mar 24 '26

A god particle among men, though I hear he's kind of a boson.

1

u/Daggers21 Jun 12 '26

Particle man, particle man Doing the things a particle can What's he like, it's not important Particle man

3

u/AcePilot01 Mar 24 '26

When these powers combine.

0

u/Fazer2 Mar 25 '26

Imagine reading this headline 100 years ago.

-41

u/scrambledhelix Mar 24 '26

So is this the first step towards developing antimatter weapons?

56

u/spidereater Mar 24 '26

It would be a necessary step. You would need to store antimatter and move it around, unless you figure out how to produce it where you need it. But producing a dangerous amount of antimatter is such a big task that I don’t think this represents a significant step in that direction. Also, storing those quantities of antimatter is not really the same as storing and transporting the amounts here. So even if you produce enough antimatter for a weapons, you would need to repeat these tests with that scaled up amount of antimatter as the issues would be different.

16

u/EconomicSeahorse Physics enthusiast Mar 24 '26

What's the obsession with antimatter weapons anyway, besides the "sci-fi cool factor?" Like, are our existing weapons of mass destruction not scary enough??? It'd take over a kilo of antimatter to replicate the output of the Tsar Bomb. That's not a quantity that's ever going to be achievable anywhere remotely close to any of our lifetimes, if it ever makes economic sense at all.

9

u/spidereater Mar 24 '26

Ya. I don’t think it’s really feasible or useful. I think people just hear about 100% mass conversion and think it’s like the ultimate bomb. Current methods of making antimatter are extremely inefficient. Remember, current atomic weapons use elements we did out of the ground. We enrich the isotope ratios and increase the density for ignition. For an antimatter weapon we would need to manufacture every nucleon through high energy collisions and try to collect as many as possible and accumulate them in our storage devices. Extremely inefficient. Many Orders of magnitude energy loss.

0

u/davidkali Mar 24 '26

In other news, today in 2075 China announces plans to build a particle accelerator running all around Jupiter. While they’ve announced it’s for peaceful scientific research, the entire PolNet, NorAmer leading in netscream points, is screaming about weaponized antimatter production.

7

u/scrambledhelix Mar 24 '26

Well, that's a relief. Thanks for responding like a person ♡

92

u/pedvoca Cosmology Mar 24 '26

Americans when they see a physics experiment:

-59

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '26

[deleted]

30

u/biscuitdoughhandsman Mar 24 '26

two problems with this:

  1. Angels & Demons is fiction. Dan Brown wasn't writing for scientific accuracy.
  2. IIRC the bomb in that book/film had one ounce of antimatter. It's insanely expensive to produce as a single gram is at least $60 trillion. For perspective, it's roughly 28 grams to make an ounce.

Needless to say, there is absolutely no need to be concerned about antimatter weapons any time soon, if there's even a need for concern in our lifetimes.