Antimatter is more of a Star Trek (and Revelation Space and a few others) issue than a Black Mirror episode.
I am far from a domain expert, I only know of four current and speculated uses for antimatter: energy storage, inducing nuclear reactions, medical imaging, and one specific tumour removal method.
For the first one, antimatter has about 1000x the energy density of fission, but also unlike a fission bomb all of it reacts (with an equal mass of normal matter), which means 1 gram of the stuff is a bigger boom than Fat Man and Little Boy combined.
Fortunately, "15000 antihydrogen atoms" is a factor of 4e19 away from 1 gram, and even if it wasn't we'd probably have to fuse the antihydrogen into antilithium to hold that much in a not completely absurd storage system.
Inducing nuclear reactions might make for some interesting propulsion systems, or might make atomic weapon proliferation even harder to prevent; that's expected at around 10^18 (the microgram level), which is still 1e14 more than announced by CERN — if it works, this use is hypothetical because current production is so much less than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter-catalyzed_nuclear_p...
Medical imaging is already done with positron sources (doesn't need complete antihydrogen atoms), and antiproton beam therapy doesn't need the antiprotons to be turned into antihydrogen at any point: https://home.cern/science/experiments/ace etc.
if produced in BIG enough quantities, very small reactors. As far as AM cannot be mined, but only produced at high price, currently it would matter only for deep space and bombs where we have RTG-s for deep space.
PET scan
(You have to wait for civic applications of the newly discovered technologies for a while, but the "technology transfer" from CERN to practical applications has a few notable examples.)
PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. The radioactive tracers emit positrons (antimatter), which then annihilate with electrons to produce the gamma rays that are detected. So it does use antimatter, just indirectly through the decay process.
Indeed, it would be quite difficult to smuggle some antimatter to a tumor. I'm saying that research in this particular area eventually led to practical application, PET scans.
None for the foreseeable future I hope.
Why is that? I must have missed the episode of black mirror you watched that would make that a bad thing.
Antimatter is more of a Star Trek (and Revelation Space and a few others) issue than a Black Mirror episode.
I am far from a domain expert, I only know of four current and speculated uses for antimatter: energy storage, inducing nuclear reactions, medical imaging, and one specific tumour removal method.
For the first one, antimatter has about 1000x the energy density of fission, but also unlike a fission bomb all of it reacts (with an equal mass of normal matter), which means 1 gram of the stuff is a bigger boom than Fat Man and Little Boy combined.
Fortunately, "15000 antihydrogen atoms" is a factor of 4e19 away from 1 gram, and even if it wasn't we'd probably have to fuse the antihydrogen into antilithium to hold that much in a not completely absurd storage system.
Inducing nuclear reactions might make for some interesting propulsion systems, or might make atomic weapon proliferation even harder to prevent; that's expected at around 10^18 (the microgram level), which is still 1e14 more than announced by CERN — if it works, this use is hypothetical because current production is so much less than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter-catalyzed_nuclear_p...
Medical imaging is already done with positron sources (doesn't need complete antihydrogen atoms), and antiproton beam therapy doesn't need the antiprotons to be turned into antihydrogen at any point: https://home.cern/science/experiments/ace etc.
Well what is the most obvious application of a highly volatile energy dense substance?
This substance can basically only do two things.
1) whatever ordinary hydrogen can
2) explode violently on contact with matter
Sure it's interesting to test 1) from a physics research point of view, but 2) is the only practical application that I know of.
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Performing precision tests of fundamental physics by verifying that antimatter behaves as predicted by standard theory.
Slow annihilating weapons that boil water that goes trough turbines.
if produced in BIG enough quantities, very small reactors. As far as AM cannot be mined, but only produced at high price, currently it would matter only for deep space and bombs where we have RTG-s for deep space.
That cloud of laser-cooled beryllium ions would probably be great for overclocking.
PET scan (You have to wait for civic applications of the newly discovered technologies for a while, but the "technology transfer" from CERN to practical applications has a few notable examples.)
PET doesn't use antimatter, at least it doesn't use it directly. It uses regular radioactive tracers.
PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. The radioactive tracers emit positrons (antimatter), which then annihilate with electrons to produce the gamma rays that are detected. So it does use antimatter, just indirectly through the decay process.
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Indeed, it would be quite difficult to smuggle some antimatter to a tumor. I'm saying that research in this particular area eventually led to practical application, PET scans.
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