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The Most Expensive Material in the World
May 13, 2008
The most expensive stuff, pound for pound, is not the gasoline you put into your car. It’s not gold, or platinum, or diamonds, or even some exotic medicine. If you bought some, you wouldn’t even be able to hold it without destroying it. Of course, you probably wouldn’t be able to buy much of it. To manufacture a milligram of it, it would cost about $300 billion, and would take decades or even centuries. Even after you manufactured it, it would be difficult to store for more than a few hours at a time. The most expensive stuff in the world, by far, is antihydrogen - the only form of antimatter that humans can reliably create.
What is antimatter?
Antimatter is simply the opposite of normal matter. Every particle (except some with no charge) has an antiparticle. Antielectrons (called positrons) have the same mass and act similarly to electrons, but have a positive charge. Antiprotons have the same mass as protons but have a negative charge. If you can get a positron to start spinning around an antiproton, you have an antihydrogen atom. Antihydrogen acts, in many ways, exactly like hydrogen - it will have the same mass, the same spectroscopy, and should have the same gravitational interaction as regular hydrogen. If you looked at something made of antimatter in a vacuum, it would look just like its regular counterpart - anticopper would look just like copper; antigold would look just like gold.
Of course, as any reader of science fiction knows, the one big difference is that if an antimatter atom touches a normal atom, the result is the theoretically most powerful explosion possible as both atoms transform into pure energy at approximately 100% efficiency. Ounce for ounce, this is more than 100 times as powerful as a hydrogen bomb.
What could I possibly do with antimatter?
Aside from helping mankind understand the basic makeup of the universe, antimatter could provide us with an incredibly efficient engine. Antimatter fuel would take up an incredibly tiny amount of space compared to normal rocket fuel. Antiparticles are already used in medicine; antimatter might help precisely destroy cancerous tumors or help with imaging technologies. Antimatter weapons could be incredibly tiny, making the “suitcase nuke” a reality, or incredibly powerful, dwarfing even the largest nuclear explosion ever.
How can I make some?
If you want to get in on the antimatter gold rush that is sure to be coming soon, you’re going to need access to a lot of electricity, a particle accelerator, and a long stretch of time. The first step is creating some antiprotons. At CERN, this is done by speeding regular positrons up to near the speed of light, then smashing them into iridium blocks. This creates enough energy for new particles to be formed, and some of these particles will be antiprotons. You will need to save these for later, as they will form the nuclei for your antihydrogen atoms. Of course, you can’t touch them with regular matter, so you’ll need to use an array of magnets to catch them in a Penning trap or something similar.
Now you’ll need to have a source of positrons. This is actually quite easy to find; several different radioactive isotopes emit positrons as they decay. In fact, positrons are used in PET (positron-emission topography) machines in many hospitals for medical imaging. One way is to get positrons for this purpose now is to use xenon clusters. Start firing the antiprotons at the xenon atoms. When the antiprotons get close to the nuclei of the xenon atoms, electron-positron pairs will suddenly appear. About one antiproton in 10,00,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10e19) will grab one of these positrons and create one antihydrogen atom. You could also try storing antiprotons in a Penning trap and bombarding them with positrons, like these guys did. Using the latter method, you should be able to create up to 100 antihydrogen atoms per second! If you’re lazy, you can just take a look at U.S. patent number 6163587, “Process for the production of antihydrogen” and copy from them.
Before you start putting together your business plan, remember that at this point, having created a few hundred atoms, you will have used more electricity than a medium-sized city would use in a day. You also will have spent billions of dollars on creating a particle accelerator capable of producing the antiprotons. You also will have had to avoid any mistakes in supporting all of these incredibly complex procedures. Then, of course, you would have to store enough of it to sell without any of it touching any normal matter. Current estimates are that, under perfect conditions, you would get back around 0.00000001% of the energy used to produce antimatter when annihilating it for energy.
Of course, the production costs become a moot point if we can find it lying around in space. Some people think this is possible; the AMS spectrometer is currently orbiting the Earth, searching for interstellar antimatter. We’re in the Wright Brothers phase of antimatter exploitation and exploration now. Antimatter may be a blessing, taking us to a world of abundant, non-polluting energy, or to destruction, if the wrong people get their hands on sufficient supplies of antimatter. It’s too early to tell. One thing is for sure, though… it’s really expensive to make it.
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