Antimatter - How it is made [2019]

there is no doubt that the future of space exploration will need extraordinary amounts of energy solar envision have always been the preferred energy source for space missions and will continue to be for many decades to come Fusion will play a role in a not so distant future but if we really want to leave our solar system we will need something way more powerful and that is something that only antimatter can provide hello everyone subject 0 here in 1928 Paul Dirac made a remarkable prediction while studying how particles behave in speeds close to the speed of light his equation that described this phenomenon would always yield two solutions his key insight was to understand that the second solution was about something real something that he would describe as being the anti counterpart of matter like for every electron there is an anti-electron that behaves the same way as the first one however with opposite charge surprisingly only four years later Paul Anderson was able to observe something quite unusual with his cloud chamber experiment he was one of the first to observe what would later be called the positron or antimatter particle on all the second 1932 which is forever captured in this book a cloud chamber is a particle detector designed for the visualization of the passage of ionizing radiation the chamber consists of a sealed environment containing supersaturated vapour of water or alcohol the energetic charged particles interact with the cloud by knocking off electrons during collisions which results in these trails that you see in the video Anderson's case he also was applying a magnetic field to the system in order to cause particles to curve according to its mass-to-charge ratio so he could study the different particles and this is how he got this picture for untrained eyes it is hard to spot the anomaly but what is really happening here is that all particles fall at distinct paths that can be assessed mathematically in its trajectory however in this picture the particle in question managed to move in the opposite direction of the magnetic field while behaviors electrons with the same mass and speed after much research and ruling out the possibility of this particle being nothing more than a proton and their Sun finally came to the conclusion that this must be what direct had predicted a few years earlier I must address that Anderson was not the first one to observe this phenomenon but he was the first to publish his findings therefore leading him to win the Nobel Prize in 1936 90 years later and we are finally starting to be able to make antimatter well good enough quantities for at least a thousand seconds when antimatter comes into contact with normal matter they annihilate each other and an enormous amount of energy is released following Einstein's equation e equals MC squared just to give you an idea about how much energy you get from this if you have one gram of antimatter coming into contact with one gram of matter that is equivalent of forty three point zero two kilotons that is more than twice the power of the fat man nuclear bomb dropped in Nagasaki if we had two kilograms one kilogram of matter and one of antimatter then we are talking about 43 megatons or really close to the most powerful bomb ever detonated which is that the Tsar bomb which released 50 megatons or 210 para joules of energy side by side and you can really see the difference and that is not all for the bombuh to release its full power you need a series of triggering methods while matter antimatter only needs to touch each other but enough with this drawing series as you can see the amount of energy stored in the system could be used to power the world and that means with only 5556 kilograms of matter antimatter this is enough to provide energy to the world for every single need throughout the entire year in contrast according to world nuclear dark the world's nuclear power reactors require 65,000 tons of uranium per year to generate only 400 gigawatts of electricity but before you get scared of this stuff just know that we can't make much of it anyway which is a huge problem currently the only way to make antimatter is by smashing protons against a wall but this is not just anyone it is a wall made of iridium among other elements first protons are accelerated in the linear accelerator called linac this machine is fundamentally different from the rest where it uses radio frequency cavities to charge the cylindrical conductors each cavity is driven by a high-power klystron which is a tube containing electron beams the electron beams are intensity modulated to a frequency of 400 million oscillations per second because these cavities oscillate at the same frequency the time each particle arrives at these cavities is important in order to get the beam with the right energy protons with right amount of energy will not be accelerated further and in contrast protons with slightly different energies will either be accelerated or decelerated reaching the desired energy these particle beings are sorted into packs called bunches when the bunch is ready with the right energy of 50 million electron volts they are injected into the proton synchrotron booster which further accelerates the bunch to 1.4 in Giga electron volts so they can be injected into the proton synchrotron PS for short the reason they introduced this booster was to increase the number of proton bunch that could be accepted into the PS before the booster was introduced linear accelerators were not powerful enough to get the protons at the energy level required for the PS with the booster there can now be more than a hundred bunches being fed into the PS in one experiment with a circumference of 628 meters the proton synchrotron further accelerates the protons to 26 Giga electron volts once the level of energy and speed is reached the particle beam is released hitting a target made of iridium at almost the speed of light these collisions create a multitude of secondary particles including anti protons but the problem is that most of these anti protons disappears within nanoseconds and they continue to do so even after make it through the main problem is at this point the most effective method of capturing antiprotons is by converting whatever smashton got through the wall back into a bunch and decelerate them this is where the antiproton decelerator comes into play da d is a ring composed of bending and focusing magnets that keep the anti protons aligned on track at the same time a strong electrical field is applied to slow the particles down to about one tenth of the speed of light it is a dis moment that the anti protons are ready to be stored and experimented with so far they were able to hold on to anti protons for 1,000 seconds or a little over 60 minutes I know it sounds cool and all but all they are able to make in one year with the machine running non-stop is 100 trillion anti protons which is not enough to power or blow anything up just to give you an idea it would take 6 billion years to produce one gram of antimatter that way that is a little less than half of the age of the universe but things are about to change because CERN will significantly increase its antimatter production capabilities starting in 2020 the extra low-energy antiproton decelerator elena is the answer to the problem that i talked about earlier you see just like fusion we only know how to make antimatter with brute force methods even though antimatter is actually emitted off of large decaying atoms and just like Anderson's experiment they can easily be spotted with a cloud or bubble chamber capturing them requires a strong magnetic fields in a complete vacuum or else they will disappear the goal with Alena is to achieve a more powerful cooling and deceleration of antiprotons something that is not possible with current machines with the setup that they currently have 99.9% of anti protons are lost due to the degrade ur foils used to decelerate them the new machine is equipped with a beam cooling system that is more efficient and is able to handle larger loads of hydrogen which increases the capturing yield tenfold it may not seem like much but this is a crucial step increase in the production amount will allow scientists to fulfill more experiments like the gravitational behavior of anti hydrogen at rest experiment up till now it was not possible simply due to the low quantities available this is important because the G bar experiment will finally give us a light on how antimatter behaves with gravity is it attracted or repelled by it how antimatter behaves with gravity is still a mystery and so far no experimental direct measure has ever been successfully performed however scientists will most likely answer this question within the next few years after Elena is fully commissioned and ready to go and that is not all this machine will also make it possible to deliver beams almost simultaneously - for other machines a trap alpha Asakusa and G bar drastically increase in the yield of experiments now instead of taking decades we might have all the answers we were looking for in the next three years at least we should hope that all right folks that's it we're done here [Music] you

Channel: Subject Zero Science

Views: 188,090

Rating: 4.9346161 out of 5

Keywords: Subject Zero Science, graphene, antiprotons, positron, dirac, short documentary, graphene technology, graphene strength test, graphene battery, graphene production, nuclear fusion, thorium reactor, space elevator, battery technology, graphene processor, fusion reactor, graphene battery technology, lithium air battery, graphene sheet, how to make graphene

Id: z7I0edsIB60

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019