A new way to create antimatter with lasers.

[RedCowboy]

Understanding antimatter holds many possibilities, soon it may be easier to make.

Laser pincers generate antimatter by recreating neutron star conditions

Some of the greatest mysteries in cosmology revolve around antimatter, and it’s hard to study because it’s rare and hard to produce in the lab. Now a team of physicists has outlined a relatively simple new way to create antimatter, by firing two lasers at each other to reproduce the conditions near…

newatlas.com

How about a gama ray laser ?

Gamma-ray laser moves a step closer to reality

A physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has performed calculations showing hollow spherical bubbles filled with a gas of positronium atoms are stable in liquid helium.

phys.org

 

[Blarg King]

Thats cool. its similar to how NIF uses laser pulses to compress and heat a fusion fuel pellet.

 

[RedCowboy]

I was thinking because gama rays are produced in the process, then if we could use gama ray lasers, we could turn electrons into positrons more readily, possibly fine tuned by varying the pulse rate frequency to a multiple of the gama ray ??

From the web
High-energy laser pulses cause electrons to oscillate, giving off gamma rays that produce electrons and positrons. An optical trap for matter-antimatter plasma is formed by four laser beams arranged in one plane, all heading towards the same point.

Laser pulses make electrons produce gamma rays, then matter/antimatter pairs of particles

High-energy laser pulses cause electrons to oscillate, giving off gamma rays that produce electrons and positrons.

www.laserfocusworld.com

 

[Blarg King]

Yeah looks like they're getting into that weird area where you can effectively turn energy into matter and vice versa, wonder how well it scales up and what the net efficiency is. It looks at least like this would be far more compact and less energy intense than needing a massive particle accelerator to produce antimatter.

 

[Mosc007]

I imagine it's not hard to Generate Positrons. Medicine has been using Positrons for Years. A PET Scan uses Positrons.


PET = Positron Emission Tomography

 

[Blarg King]

Yeah, but then you have to manufacture, store, and manage a bunch of radioactive material that most likely emits particles that aren't positrons along side the positrons you want. And because the positrons are being emitted from matter I think its most likely going to bump into another bit of matter and annihilate before escaping the bulk material to be captured by a magnetic trap. IIRC, a PET scan isn't directly imaging using the positrons, it captures the gamma rays emitted when the positron annihilates with an electron.

Also, it might take a massive amount of material to get the same amount of positrons out as this new laser system, and that raises a lot of issues with costs and being able to safely operate a system with large amounts of radioactive material. The licensing and certifications alone for being able to posses and store large quantities of material like that would be a nightmare.

 

[RedCowboy]

Amazingly not only uranium is now enriched by laser, isotopic enrichment of chlorine, molybdenum, carbon and silicon are enriched via. the silex laser enrichment process and apparently it's easier and less expensive that using centrifuges...... soon every kid on the block will be making antimatter bombs.

Separation of isotopes by laser excitation - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[kecked]

They are still making extemely small amounts and it looks to be through pair production so they are indeed making the particles via energy to mass conversion. The trick is separating and isolating the positrons fast enough! What they then need is to make antiprotons which are thousands of times more massive to combine and make the anti hydrogen atoms. Still interesting but long way from gram scale production.

 

[RedCowboy]

Hey, 1st you crawl then learn to walk and later run like the wind.
The mere fact we are converting energy to matter in other than an explosion or collision is fantastic, I can only imagine how amazing the lives of future generations could be as we evolve.

 

[Blarg King]

I just hope they're careful, theres a lot of raw energy even in the smallest amount of matter
I remember before they turned on the LHC, people were worried it was going to create a black hole and destroy the Earth
Or create strange quarks, and destroy the Earth XD

 

[Mosc007]

When you have a lot of Atoms the energy is enormous. E-MC^2.

Eg. 1 Kg of Uraniun contains 2,550,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Atoms.


Working with Single Atoms you have almost no energy.

 

[Encap]

"laser pincers generate antimatter" article says "But now, researchers have designed a new method that could produce antimatter in smaller labs. While the team hasn’t built the device yet, simulations show that the principle is feasible" and "For now the concept remains speculative" + the article is 3 years old/from July 2021 with no word about it since then so....

 

[RedCowboy]

Laser blasting antimatter into existence

Antimatter is an exotic material that vaporizes when it contacts regular matter. If you hit an antimatter baseball with a bat made of regular matter, it would explode in a burst of light. It is rare to find antimatter on Earth, but it is believed to exist in the furthest reaches of the universe...

www.eurekalert.org

Trapping and laser cooling of antihydrogen points to advances in antimatter experimentation

Making, magnetically trapping, and laser cooling antihydrogen atoms via laser Doppler cooling leads to a stable assemblage of anti-atoms suitable for next-generation physics experiments...

www.laserfocusworld.com