Would tabletop particle accelerators improve antimatter production capabilities

[torquemada]

while i am well aware of the prohibitive cost of antimatter production and its current status as something that is only of academic interest, i understand that the development of tabletop particle accelerators isn't as far fetched as, say, cold fusion in that it doesn't automatically invite skepticism. in fact i heard somewhere that given the prohibitive cost and time associated with the LHC that there is a strong desire to develop scaled down particle accelerators. how widespread is this drive within the physics community? and would a table top accelerator improve our ability to generate antimatter?

 

[Drakkith]

The accelerator would have to provide enough power to accelerate whatever particles you are using to a high enough velocity to produce matter-antimatter pairs upon collision. Since this requires very very high velocities, you must also increase the diameter or length of the accelerator to accelerate the particles enough or be able to hold them inside the accelerator at such high velocities. CAN you do it? I really don't know as I don't know the required energies for producing antimatter nor do I know the engineering principles of an accelerator and the required size/power.

 

[ZapperZ]

while i am well aware of the prohibitive cost of antimatter production and its current status as something that is only of academic interest, i understand that the development of tabletop particle accelerators isn't as far fetched as, say, cold fusion in that it doesn't automatically invite skepticism. in fact i heard somewhere that given the prohibitive cost and time associated with the LHC that there is a strong desire to develop scaled down particle accelerators. how widespread is this drive within the physics community? and would a table top accelerator improve our ability to generate antimatter?

This is a very strange topic. It appears as if the "drive" to have a "scaled down particle accelerators" is solely to produce antimatter?

First of all, we can produce "antimatter" already. Look at PET scans. We don't need any particle accelerators. Producing matter-antimatter pairs using gamma rays (i.e. what you would use an accelerator for) is actually not very efficient. But we would use that method (for example, for the ILC) because you need to generate positrons with properties that are appropriate for what we want to use it for, such as emittance, polarization, etc.

Note that these so-called "table top accelerators" that are trying to achieve high energies for next generation of high energy physics colliders are not really "table top". Just look at any of the plasma-wakefield accelerator facility.

Zz.