Where Can We Find Anti-Particles for E=mc2 Energy Release?

[Karimspencer]

I have been doing research in e=mc2, and to release the energy , you have to get an anti-particle to collide with the particle equivalent to a specific value of energy.
Now i want to know where do you get this anti-particle, or is it just theoretically described?

 

[Bob S]

Fermilab (near Chicago) used to produce and store about 1 x 10¹¹ antiprotons per hour before the Tevatron was shut down last year.

 

[mathman]

Positrons (anti-electrons) are produced all the time in hospitals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography

Also there are other processes which convert matter to energy, such as nuclear fission (reactors and bombs) and nuclear fusion (sun's energy).

 

[Karimspencer]

oh that's is pretty interesting, can anybody get an anti-proton if he had the equipment and knowledge?

 

[Devils]

Yes. Flourine-18 will emit an anti-particle (positron).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine-18

To make it you will need a cyclotron which unfortunately Walmart doesn't sell to home users yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron

 

[mfb]

Positrons are light and quite easy to produce. Antiprotons are much harder. You need an accelerator of significant size (won't fit in your home) to accelerate particles up to ~6 billion electronvolts. If you shoot these particles on a fixed target, some antiprotons are produced.
If you want to catch and control them, it gets trickier. Few accelerator complexes are capable of doing this - I know of Fermilab (just acceleration) and CERN (traps antiprotons at rest), and the FAIR project is built to trap antiprotons, too.

 

[Karimspencer]

Well, i see that we can make a lot of anti-matter, why don't people use this for electrical energy by taking advantage of e=mc2 .

 

[Vanadium 50]

How much energy is produced in annihilating 100 billion antiprotons? What is the power for doing this every hour?

 

[Karimspencer]

So you are saying that we would make less energy than the energy that we put?

 

[mfb]

You can get a lot of energy out of antimatter. But: You need at least the same amount of energy to produce the antimatter. This is a fundamental limit - even with 100% efficient production and annihilation, you could not use it as a power source.

Theory would allow to use antimatter as a very compact energy storage. However, practical limitations forbid this: In real accelerators, the efficiency to generate antimatter is extremely bad. If you want to store it as neutral antimatter, the efficiency is lower than 0,01%, and I can give you this estimation without even looking up numbers because the efficiency is way lower than that.

 

[Karimspencer]

I see... It sounds unfortunate because if it had a high efficiency , it could make a huge impact in the industry.