CERN and thw anti-matter bomb?

NIF has a cool visitors center and tours too. There are some nice wineries to have lunch at in Livermore too. And of course, it's close to San Francisco.

The big glass laser slabs and flashtubes are beautiful.

I was in the entry shack one day, years ago, when Edward Teller was signing in too. He was very old and frail and they treated him like God.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The numbers don't work. If you want to make loud bangs, use the electricity to separate hydrogen and oxygen and deonate that.

Converting electricity into antimatter is likely something like 1e-18 efficient.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Hmmm, I never worked that out. Hold on... You're right it's crazily inefficient.

We get about one antiproton for every million protons that hit the conversion target. I don't actually know the electrical power consumption of the Proton Synchrotron and the Antiproton Decelerator.

The annihilation of an antiproton with a proton yields about 2 GeV.

Jeroen Belleman

NIF is occasionally getting numbers like 2:1 fusion conversion efficiency, light energy to thermal output. Wall-plug efficiency is below 1%.

I wonder how tokamaks are doing these days.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

You raise an interesting question, to wit, with coming restriction in Europe over rising energy costs and possible Covid-like restrictions for "residents" due to the ongoing war in the Middle East, will the scientists at CERN be forced to cut back on the massive energy consumption of CERN?

I don't have the detailed knowledge. I know that several of the experiments using antiprotons can continue to function for a few months after the accelerators are stopped. The vacuum is of the order of 10nPa. (7.5e-11 torr)

I think the analogy with globular star clusters is a good one, except that antiprotons repel rather than attract and indeed externally applied electric fields are needed to keep them trapped. They use Penning-Malmberg traps. Some experiments inject electrons to further cool the antiprotons.

Annihilation requires interactions involving three particles, which is rare because there are so few of them. I believe the gravitational capture of one body by another also usually requires the presence of a third.

Jeroen Belleman