Антивещество: а что о нем известно; как оно создается; его применение сегодня и завтра?

"Мне кажется очень занимательным, что магнитное поле Земли работает примерно так же, как те магнитные ловушки, которые мы используем в лабораториях", - отмечает представитель CERN Рольф Ландуа.
Подробнее: 404 - не найдено / Издание о высоких технологиях - CNews

 

Wyvern-2> Оправдалась! Не помню было это тут или нет:

В период с июля 2006 по декабрь 2008, PAMELA обнаружил 28 антипротонов удерживаемых магнитным полем исходящем из южного полюса Земли (публикация в Astrophysical Journal Letters, DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/737/2/l29). Хотя для PAMELA доступна только лишь небольшая часть внутреннего радиационного пояса, можно предположить, что антипротоны встречаются по всему его объему. "Мы говорим о миллиардах частиц", - сказал член команды, Франческо Кафагна из Университета Бари в Италии.

 

Wyvern-2> Еще интересней в этом отношении радиационные пояса Юпитера - там антивещество можно наверняка получать вообще в "товарных количествах"

"Я хотел бы заметить одну очень интересную деталь: магнитное поле Земли действует подобно магнитным ловушкам, которые мы используем в лаборатории", - сказал Рольф Ландуа из лаборатории элементарных частиц ЦЕРН поблизи Женевы

 

Мировое производство антивещества является крайне низким. Сегодня оно составляет порядка от 1 до 10 нанограмм в год. Однако, существуют проекты, позволяющие увеличить производство антивещества на два и даже три порядка. Другой потенциальный источник антипротонов – радиационные пояса[§]. Максимальный поток антипротонов, образующихся в результате распада альбедо антинейтронов в околоземном пространстве оценивается в 4000 м^-2с^-1. Разрабатываются сборники-ловушки для таких антипротонов. Наиболее удачная схема сулит производительность до ~ 8.6 мкг/год. Однако для полетов за пределы Солнечной системы требуется килограммы антипротонов.

 

...an article in the
San Francisco Chronicle in October 2004, which broke the news
that ‘The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars
investigating ways to use a radical power source—antimatter, the
eerie “mirror” of ordinary matter—in future weapons’. The story
spread around the world and in India escalated to the claim
that not just the US Air Force but ‘defence scientists in many
countries are working on anti-matter weapon systems’ that are
‘small enough to hold in one’s hand’.
...
...there was a spate of news reports claiming the
US Air Force to be developing antimatter weapons. The stories
seem to have grown out of a speech given on 24 March 2004 by
Kenneth Edwards, director of the ‘revolutionary munitions’ team
at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

Kenneth_Edwards.pdf

He was a keynote speaker at the NASA Institute for Advanced
Concepts (NIAC) conference in Arlington, Virginia, and in that
talk, Edwards discussed the potential uses of positrons—basic
particles of antimatter. There is no doubt that Edwards was fully
aware of and impressed by the potential of antimatter. His speech,
which ‘almost defied belief ’ according to some media reports,
stressed that even specks of antimatter too small to see could be
devastating. As an example 50-millionths of a gram of positrons
would be enough to generate a blast equal to the explosion
(roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred
P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which
killed 168 people and injured over 500.

Readers of the newspaper reports were reminded that these
weapon systems ‘are devastating’ and that ‘the level of destruction
is unimaginable’; there is no ‘will be’ or ‘could’, only ‘are’
and ‘is’, as if these devices are already being developed. Antimatter
weapons were presented as environmentally friendly: in
contrast to regular nuclear bombs, positron bombs ‘won’t eject
plumes of radioactive debris’,3 and the primary product of the
annihilation of positrons and electrons was advertised as an invisible
but extremely dangerous burst of gamma radiation, which
‘can kill a large number of soldiers without touching the civilian
population’.

When journalists from the San Francisco Chronicle started asking
questions, the Air Force allegedly ‘forbade its employees from
publicly discussing the antimatter research program’. For conspiracy
theorists this is the proof that the stories are true; that antimatter
weapons of devastating power are in hand (metaphorically at
least!).
...
Having seen the power that science had managed to unleash from
the atomic nucleus, and with fusion (hydrogen) bombs already
being developed, the cold war was a time for funding blue-sky
ideas in science and technology lest the Soviet Union be first to
develop the ‘next big thing’. Alongside the more sober ideas were
others that verged on charlatanism. Telepathy, psychokinesis, and
antigravity paint were but three, so it is plausible that governments
have considered the possibilities for antimatter energy sources or
antimatter weapons. Unlike the three examples just mentioned,
there is good evidence for antimatter, as good as that for nuclear
fission in 1939; the subsequent development of the atomic bomb
was a tour de force of applied science and engineering. The successful
construction of nuclear weapons confirmed the ‘can do’
approach for strategists in the USA. So antimatter devices at first
sight appear to fit the bill.

It has been claimed that the US Air Force has been funding
numerous scientific studies of the basic physics of antimatter for
up to fifty years. More likely is that the advances made in antimatter
research at open laboratories such as CERN in Europe and
Fermilab in the USA, which began to hit the headlines after 1996,
set the military in motion.

...

...we saw the reports that the US Air Force is developing
antimatter weapons. Now that we know more about the
reality of antimatter, we can see that there is no possibility to
make antimatter bombs for the same reason you cannot use it
to store energy: we can’t accumulate enough of it at high enough
density.

What therefore are we to make of the speech by Kenneth
Edwards in 2004 that excited interest in the US Air Force’s
research into antimatter weapons?

Following Edwards’ speech, newspaper reporters contacted
Eglin Air Force Base, whose response was initially very positive.
In July 2004 Rex Swenson at Eglin’s Munitions Directorate con-
firmed that everyone was ‘very excited about this technology’.
Swenson was set to arrange media interviews with Edwards but
within a month he was overruled by higher officials in the Air
Force and Pentagon. According to the report in the San Francisco
Chronicle, Edwards repeatedly declined to be interviewed claiming
to be under strict instructions from his superiors. The tell-tale
quote in the official line was that ‘we’re not at the point where
we need to be doing any public interviews’. In the world of
conspiracy theorists, this is ‘proof ’ that the military are trying to
suppress news of the latest big thing. In reality the explanation
turns out to be much simpler: there were no antimatter weapons;
the project was a dream.

The US Air Force was not developing antimatter weapons,
Edwards’ 2004 talk notwithstanding. It had however funded a
small research project into antiprotons, without any secrecy, at
Pennsylvania State University. I knew this project well as some
years before I had been on a committee at CERN evaluating
experimental projects involving antiprotons at LEAR. One of
the scientists was Gerald Smith, formerly chairman of physics
at Penn State and I noticed that his name was mentioned in
Edwards’ presentation. Dr Smith had retired from Penn State and
in 2001 founded Positronics Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
As the name implies, the emphasis has shifted from antiprotons
to positrons, which are much more accessible. Advertised
applications include energy storage, destruction of chemical and
biological agents, nuclear medicine, and propulsion.

In 2004, when interviewed by the reporters, Smith confirmed
that the Air Force had provided over three million dollars of
funding for his team’s research. However, there has been no
demonstration or even serious claim that production or storage
of bulk antimatter is achievable, not even in amounts that are the
merest trifles of what would be required for energy.

One of the leading experts on antimatter, Rolf Landua of
CERN, has commented on the irony that ‘Scientists realized the
atom bomb to be a real possibility many years before one was
actually built and exploded; the public then was totally surprised
and amazed. The antimatter bomb on the other hand has been
imagined by the public who wants to know more about it, yet
we have known for a very long time that it’s not at all a practical
device.’


Meanwhile the US Air Force’s hopes for an antimatter aircraft
have been taken up by students. A research project linked to Eglin
Air Force Base summarized the challenge of designing such a
craft as follows:

Hello!

Our website is at FAMU-FSU Have a great day! //  www.eng.fsu.edu

 

"Positron energy conversion will be used for antimatter annihilation
energy, which will provide the aircraft with propulsion and offensive
capabilities. Eglin Air Force Base requires the following performance
specifications for this prototype. The wingspan of the aircraft cannot
exceed three feet. The aircraftmust have a loiter capability which requires
mid flight hover. To satisfy the offensive requirements paint balls will be
fired from the aircraft as a safe simulated ammunition."

There in a nutshell you have the US Air Force’s hopes of developing
antimatter for power and weapons laid bare.

How did a speech by a funding officer, far from the centre of
Pentagon power, lead the world’s media to report that antimatter
weaponswere imminent? Edwards’ speech and media briefing promoted
the line that such weapons would be free from radioactive
debris. Dan Brown’s 2000 novel, Angels and Demons was at that
time beginning to hit public awareness among the best-sellers, and
featured an antimatter bomb that created ‘no pollution or radiation’.
The general assumptions that underpin Brown’s work of
fiction have uncanny parallels with what, within a year, the US Air
Force spokesman and the media seemed to be promoting as fact.