Comment by pfdietz
7 days ago
It increases the rate of production of neutral antihydrogen from antiprotons and positrons by a factor of 8. It doesn't increase the efficiency of production of antiprotons, which is the extremely inefficient, energy intensive part.
The output got increased by a factor of 8, did the energy consuption increase proportionately? If not, its an efficiency gain.
If you have a process where it takes 5MW to produce one component and 80KW to convert that component into the final product, and you increase the efficiency of the second step 8 times so it only takes 10KW, that's real and awesome, but still almost irrelevant to the overall efficiency of the process. I have no idea what the actual numbers are, just stating the general concept.
Conversely efficiency is a lot less important if it unlocks capability you otherwise don't have at all.
Antimatter is a unique element: nothing else can do what it does. The game changer would be producing industrially useful amounts for further experimentation.
(Antimatter chemistry would be incredibly interesting and quite possibly a practical way to actually use antimatter - shoot the beam into a reaction or solid matrix to do interesting reactions due to the electronic properties before it annihilates).
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They cut production time to a given number of anti-atoms from 10 weeks to 7 hours by improving the electron cooling, just from this fact it is a bit rich to insist the anti-proton generation is the limiting factor.
Going to the paper itself we can observe that the CERN Antiproton Decelerator can deliver 10^7 antiprotons every 2 minutes. Remembering it previously took 10 weeks to capture 10^4 anti-atoms, I hope you forgive me for not agreeing that the antiproton generation is the source of important inefficiencies.