alt Hacker NewsFrom a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity.
Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle.
Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?
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> ideal spacecraft fuel
If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation.
I suppose at least it will kill you faster than your neurons can communicate so you wouldn't even notice.
From a layman's point of view, I'm more interested in antimatter's potential as a weapon.
Not necessarily because I want to use it, but because I have a vague idea of what it's capable of, and what that would mean in the hands of certain groups capable of producing it.
Very tough engineering problem. Amount transported is 92 atoms. A mole (1 gram) of anti-hydrogen is 6.23x10^23 atoms.
Not familiar with the subject so genuine question. HOW would antimatter be used as fuel? There is energy released in matter antimatter annihilation, but where would the force to move a spacecraft come from?
Black holes are good star ship engines because they turn everything into Hawking radiation.
The confinement scheme used here is likely a Penning Trap. Such devices are limited in the amount of antimatter they can store by the Brillouin limit. The energy stored will be no more than the magnetic energy of the field of the trap, and so much less than the explosive yield of a mass of TNT (say) equal to the mass of the trap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma