Why This Stuff Costs $2700 Trillion Per Gram - Antimatter at CERN

there's a warehouse in France right on the Swiss border where the most expensive material in the world is created so Wikipedia seems confident but I'm not so sure we can even call it material because it's not made of regular matter this stuff is the rarest and potentially the most dangerous on earth and scientists from around the world are just trying to figure out how to put it in a bottle and carry it across the street antimatter but what is antimatter and why is there so little of it it's the rarest substance on earth it's the very substance in the universe but scientists theorize that the Big Bang should have created a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter and yet we look around and see almost completely matter why that is surprisingly one of the biggest unanswered questions in physics and we're gonna dive into it hey I'm Diana and you're watching physics girl I am back in the United States but I recently traveled to Switzerland initially this speak at EPFL in Lausanne but I decided to stop by the most impressive scientific facility on earth so we're in Geneva Switzerland right now oh no God in Geneva Switzerland this is the home of the United Nations well it's a Large Hadron Collider and I've never been [Music] okay so what is this room this is sort of the storage locker area Wow so only people with access special access can enter here so so this is what they call the ad hall after the antiproton decelerator the ad yeah yes and so this decelerator is beneath us beneath these concrete blocks you see these yellow fences yeah so that's the big ring going around so the whole purpose of the ad Hall is to house this ring inside of a concrete tunnel that slows down antimatter particles and then subsequently there are experiments that study it we're doing the opposite of the rest of we don't like protons whoo you want the antiproton we don't like accelerating we want to decelerate it's all shut down right now for maintenance so we got to go down in the tunnel Wow there's all this concrete in cement oh my gosh I just want the Burning Man I feel like a lot of people were wearing this so the blue things they are bending magnets so they're typically at the cornice of your ring and they will turn your beam you know give it a kick or a turn yeah the red ones are the quadrupole magnets okay and they are used to focus the beam it's like Legos but instead of like each piece in the ring is a giant electromagnet it's not a coincidence that the antimatter Factory is at CERN you need these super energetic particles driven by the massive particle accelerators at CERN to create antimatter well the way they are generated you have these you know collisions big amount of energy and from this you automatically have a side product being anti protons so they're created they need to direct the anti protons toward the ad Hall using these giant coils of wire it's connected to some transformers which will send this current to the magnet so you can have this tiny kick of your beam puff so all that specialized equipment and the crazy amounts of energy you use to create energetic particles as part of why antimatter is so expensive in 2006 antimatter costs an estimated 25 billion dollars per gram to make sounds like a lot but that's just for positrons for anti protons some estimates put the cost at about 3 quadrillion dollars per gram to figure out why antimatter is so rare we have to first look at why it can be so dangerous when antimatter comes into contact with regular matter they annihilate they disappear and they turn into pure light energy one teaspoon of antimatter came into contact with regular matter it would create an explosion large enough to destroy all of Manhattan for comparison you'd need about 200 thousand metric tons of TNT to release the same amount of energy or ten nuclear bombs to make it even more relatable the amount of antimatter you would need to destroy the moon would be equivalent to the same mass of all the fish on earth but let's be clear the small amount of antimatter that we're capable of making with current technologies is in no way dangerous so what is antimatter what is this stuff that's capable of annihilating with regular matter this stuff would look just like regular matter if we had enough of it to be able to see it amazingly scientists predicted that antimatter should exist before they discovered it which is gonna help us figure out what it is this is what happened you know when you're solving the quadratic equation x equals negative b plus or minus square root of allah that plus or minus can give you two possible solutions but sometimes you get a negative solution and you're like that doesn't make sense I'm gonna throw it out well in 1928 English physicist Paul Dirac was working on a mathematical equation describing electron behavior as you do and it ended up with two solutions instead of throwing out the positive solution he eventually thought what if this second solution described something real it would be exactly like an electron all the same properties but with a positive charge that would be crazy but he predicted this particle could exist according to the math already in 1932 in one of their cloud chambers you know these tracks they saw an electron with let's say the wrong charge how insane is physics they discovered a new type of particle because it just popped out of the math American physicist Karl Anderson detected this opposite electron and then published a paper calling it a positron and the name stuck which makes me wish that electrons were called Megatron's now we're in for a treat because unlike many experiments of the time there's actually a photograph of the original positron passing through a cloud chamber experiment in 1932 this line shows the path of the particle this was the first discovery of antimatter each matter particle has a brother or a sister and it has the same mass but it has the opposite charge and the opposite magnetic moment at least that's what our theories tell us so that's what antimatter is but it's kind of a boring description of antimatter because it ignores the annihilation and stuff okay so 1932 we've had the first detection of antimatter this same year as the Quidditch match between the Applebee arrows and the brats of vultures it wasn't until 1995 that physicists made the first atom of antihydrogen why did it take so long well annihilation it's really hard to work with material that you can never hold in your hand it can't even touch your equipment or poof it can't even touch the air or poof so this Factory in Europe its goal is to keep making and studying a material worth nearly trillions per ounce what are they studying well there's one big question keeping scientists interested scientists don't know why antimatter is so rare that's one of the big unanswered questions and physics of our time so the certain experiments are looking to study the properties of antimatter and see if they can find any differences between it and regular matter a few experiments are studying what will happen when you drop antimatter will it go down like regular matter nearly every physicist says yes we suspect it will go down when you drop it but we've never done that experiment another experiment is just trying to store antimatter in a container and carry it across the street so this experiment is called Puma they want to bring this you know their bottle of antimatter to a facility across the street and so there they have different elements that are radioactive and so if you have antimatter interacting with this you know you will get annihilations but the properties of what comes out of this annihilation will tell you something about how the neutrons and protons were distributed in these nuclei and several other experimental groups hope to study the spectral lines of antihydrogen and compare them to hydrogen so we know exactly what colors hydrogen emits but so we recently were able to do the same type of you know spectroscopy looking at the light that comes out of anti hydrogen and some experiments like the one ELISA works on are measuring the properties of anti protons that they've to see whether they're the same as proton properties bass is purely anti protons so they typically we typically have a reservoir of anti protons about let's say 200 anti protons that we can store in this panning chap that you've seen and we can keep this the record was 400 years 400 days and so we take one antiproton at the time put this in our measurement trap and we try to measure its properties so charge mass and magnetic moment so that's the answer to our question why is there so little antimatter in the universe we don't know yet that's why all these really really small people are doing crazy experiments trying to figure it out at CERN and I'm really excited to follow along and see what they find because I know they'll find something thank you guys so much for watching this video and happy Antti physics see you're the messiest boss if you were like oh what's going on was this patreon thing it's ostensibly a platform that allows independent creators to be supported through their audience but it's also an excellent place for a community and that's what that's what I want that's why it my first perk I decided on was an online hangout with patreon and then there's sign postcards with experiments on them oh we've been saving up the bloopers make a coin make a clip so what next what are we gonna do with the support from patreon well I really want to do bigger projects on location shoots like this one at CERN a women in science series done the right way where women just talk about their science and upgrading equipment plus supporting this really significant recent change to physics girl I have some paid full-time friend Levi full-time shooter editor so they're mostly full-time produce and so that your patronage can help keep them off the streets and give me some real friends no but really they if you want to contribute to the patreon my favorite option is just Google physics girl patreon oh yeah you don't have to contribute if you don't want to but where you can't that is totally fine I'm super thankful for just having you watching the videos and getting excited with me about science because that's kind of the whole point yeah [Music]

Channel: Physics Girl

Views: 4,349,046

Rating: 4.8827782 out of 5

Keywords: physics girl, dianna cowern, antimatter, CERN, LHC, antihydrogen, antiprotons, positron, electron, particle physics, higgs boson, annihilation, physics, science, patreon

Id: PCuyCJocJWg

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/cadehoward]

Yeah I'll get an 8th

[u/hardlynoticable7]

Really nice vid. Definitely gonna subscribe.

[u/TryHard-Rune]

Isn’t that a super dangerous job? Like one little air leak and kaboom?

[u/heathmon1856]

To blow up the moon, itd have to be the mass of every fish in the ocean, or just 1 fish? I’m confuzzed

[u/Joebyrd1]

What in the world kind of number is $2700 trillion?

[u/DayGarbage]

Put a goddamn folded up napkin or something under that table!

[u/QuantumDisc0ntinuity]

World Domination could be yours for the low price of 1000 trillion dollars!

Imagine all the world leaders eating your shit for once.

[u/Gustavmat]

I was literally there last week with my high school class. It is freaking amazing to see in real life!

[u/Joebyrd1]

Even if I didn't understand what quadrillion was (it's extremely difficult to grasp the meaning of that kind of number), I would still understand it better than 2700 trillion. That's what I don't understand about the money system in the video game surviving mars.