Excelente ensayo sobre las utilidades energéticas de la antimateria y sus propiedades y origenes físicos.

1. Antimatter Physics
By David León
Date: Thursday, December 2, 2010
Antimatter, True Power
Have you ever imagine carrying on the palm of your hands such a power that could explode a city with just the use of 0.2
kilograms of such a new and exotic kind atoms called antimatter. Many people had wondered if there could exist such a
kind of power kept in a tiny size of space.
Antimatter is such a new discovery predicted by the physician Arthur Schuster. He hypothesized antiatoms, whole antimatter
solar systems and discussed the possibility of matter and antimatter annihilating each other.
Antimatter is a new form of the matter, normal matter is the one that interacts with the universe that we live in, is what we
see, the air we breath, everything we touch is made from normal matter. All the molecules that structure the earth, and our
solar system are made from normal and positive matter.
However we mentioned antimatter and as it name says, antimatter is just the opposite of the atoms that compose the world
we know. If we know that the matter we re made of is structured by protons that contains positive charge, neutrons that does
not have any charge at all and the electrons that move around the nucleus in elliptical way that posses negative charge, then
antimatter applies to the same kind of particles with the difference that instead of electrons (-) particles called “Positrons”
take their place with positive charge and the “Antiprotons” take the place of positive protons as a negative charge particle.
These new antiparticles create what we call antimatter, is the same as matter but electrically different from it, could be
expressed as negative matter then.
Scientific researches and physician’s calculus had come to the conclusion that if you release a bunch of antiatoms and let
them interact with matter, they might annihilate each other introducing to us the most pure kind of energy known, 100%
pure energy would be released with its explosion.
In Dan Brown´s book Angles and Demons, a small band of extremists, the Illuminati, have hatched a plot to blow up the
Vatican using antimatter bomb, stolen from CERN, the nuclear laboratory outside Geneva. The conspirators know that
when matter and antimatter touch each other the result is a monumental explosion, many times more powerful than a
hydrogen bomb. Although antimatter bomb is pure fiction, antimatter is very real.
An atomic bomb, for all its awesome power, is only 1 percent efficient. Only a tiny fraction of the uranium is turned into
energy. But if an antimatter bomb could be constructed, it would convert 100 percent of its mass into energy, making it far
more efficient than a nuclear bomb.
At the present the giant particles accelerators at CERN and Fermilab outside Chicago have been able to create minute
quantities of antihydrogen. (Blasting a beam of high-energy protons into a target using particles accelerators does this).
In a pure vacuum, these anti-atoms might live forever. But because of impurities and collisions with the wall, these anti-
atoms eventually strike ordinary atoms and they are annihilate, realizing energy.

2. The current rate of production of anti-matter is between one billion to 10 billion of a gram per year. The yield may increase
by a factor of 3 about the year 2020. The economic of antimatter are very poor. In 2004 it cost CERN $20 million to
produce several trillions of a gram of antimatter. At that rate, producing a single gram of anti-matter would cost one $100
quadrillion and the antimatter factory would need to run continuously for 100 Billions years! This makes antimatter the
most precious substance in the world. (Michio Kaku – Physics of the Impossible, 2009)
The antimatter that is produced is lying safely inside to magnets that suspend it into a magnetic field. This way antimatter will
not have any contact with matter so they will not annihilate each other.
In the future antimatter would be possible to raise energy centrals that produce high-level voltages to light a complete city for
almost a year with the requirement of a few grams of antimatter. “Imaging that in the future starships that fly to the moon or
mars were so easy to reach just because of the energy that we will be able to produce with antimatter reactor in those times”
says the physician Gerald Smith of Pennsylvania State University. He believe that a short term as little as 4 milligrams of
positrons would be sufficient to take an antimatter rocket to mars in just several weeks. He notes that the energy packet into
antimatter is about billion times greater than the energy packed into ordinary rocket fuel.
So far, with the possibility of using this new energy resource, many things on earth would be able to be done by using this
new kind of energy. The actual problem is the cost, but surely in 20 years physicians will hit the goal of the industrial
production of antimatter.
Physics have done the greatest discovery of the millennium by raising antimatter atoms on their hadrons collider. They have
discovery the other part of the mass that exist on the universe, what was left from the big bang and how we live in a world
where matter had won the fight between matter and antimatter since Big Bang times. Pure energy is raised by annihilating
this particles with antiparticles, making honors to Einstein’s equation E=mc2. The result is just pure energy.
I hope some day this system evolve the complete planet so that we could replace fossil fuels into 100% energy result without
leaving any trace of atomic garbage as atomic reactors do or contaminating the planet with the trace of carbon dioxin. Hope
some day the future of industry and energy change Earth´s life.
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