points
4 months ago
| 1 comment
| HN
Make an antimatter liquid with strong intra-molecular bonds (e.g. anti-H2O) that is only slightly ionized. That would be easier to contain magnetically.
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pfdietz
4 months ago
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How do you propose to do that? Getting any antielement beyond antihydrogen would require doing nuclear fusion on antiprotons.
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queuebert
4 months ago
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Which is hard but theoretically possible.
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pfdietz
4 months ago
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Fusion of protons is theoretically possible in the sense of you can theoretically build a star from antihydrogen. Laboratory fusion of protons is very unlikely ever to be practical. The "S factor" (representing the fusion cross section aside from geometric and tunneling rate factors) for pp fusion is something like 24 orders of magnitude smaller than for DD fusion.
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pfdietz
4 months ago
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I'll add that maybe one could achieve fusion in a different way, by a means that's highly wasteful of energy. After all, the goal here is to get the fused nucleus, not achieve net energy production in doing so (as is the goal in fusion of ordinary nuclei).

Here, one might exploit the reaction p(p,pi+)d (or, rather, it's antimatter equivalent, which makes a negative pion), at a center of mass energy above threshold for creating the charged pion (which has a mass of 139.579 MeV. This is wildly energy negative, but if one has already invested many GeV in making each antiproton that's presumably acceptable. The cross section for this reaction is only ~200 microbarns, but that will be many orders of magnitude higher than the ordinary fusion cross section.

The solid antimatter one would probably target as an end goal would be anti-(lithium hydride).

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