![]() The whole point of a reactor is to produce energy, and since both the processes of converting energy into antimatter and turning antimatter into energy will always have inefficiencies, you are better off just charging batteries or beaming the energy back to Earth directly (although this may also result in weapon applications). If you are trying to make an economically profitable fusion reactor, then no. Having that much matter in outer space would be way more than necessary for a kinetic bombardment attack, never-mind what you could do using antimatter. Exactly what you consider a "useful" amount of antimatter is highly dependent on what you are doing. In 1 year this Dyson sphere will produce $ 7.71*10^7kg $, which is about the mass of a very large ship. If your Dyson sphere orbits a Sun-like star, is a circle with the same radius of the Earth, and is 1 AU from the star, then this formula simplifies to: You divide by 2 because you need to produce matter and antimatter in equal amounts.Īccording to Forbes, the most efficient commercially available solar panels have an efficiency of about 20%. Where e is the efficiency of the Dyson sphere's collectors, t is how long the Dyson sphere as been active, L is the luminosity of the host star, S is the surface area of the Dyson sphere's collectors, r is the radius of the Dyson sphere from the host star, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum. The amount of antimatter produced by a Dyson sphere is simply the energy flux of the host star at the relevant distance times how long the Dyson sphere has been active. The starting point is the Antiproton Decelerator, which slows down antiprotons so that physicists can investigate their properties.This is one of those problems where you just multiply everything together and you get the right answer. So why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe?Īt CERN, physicists make antimatter to study in experiments. In January 2011, research by the American Astronomical Society discovered antimatter (positrons) originating above thunderstorm clouds positrons are produced in terrestrial gamma ray flashes created by electrons accelerated by strong electric fields in the clouds. The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. The insight opened the possibility of entire galaxies and universes made of antimatter.īut when matter and antimatter come into contact, they annihilate – disappearing in a flash of energy. For example, for the electron there should be an "antielectron", or "positron", identical in every way but with a positive electric charge. ![]() But classical physics (and common sense) dictated that the energy of a particle must always be a positive number.ĭirac interpreted the equation to mean that for every particle there exists a corresponding antiparticle, exactly matching the particle but with opposite charge. The equation – which won Dirac the Nobel Prize in 1933 – posed a problem: just as the equation x 2 = 4 can have two possible solutions (x = 2 or x = −2), so Dirac's equation could have two solutions, one for an electron with positive energy, and one for an electron with negative energy. In 1928, British physicist Paul Dirac wrote down an equation that combined quantum theory and special relativity to describe the behaviour of an electron moving at a relativistic speed. RAZOR's Neil Cairns went to Cern in Switzerland to see how scientists are generating antimatter particles and learning how to control it in.
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