Why This Stuff Costs $2700 Trillion Per Gram - Antimatter at CERN

There is a warehouse in France right on the border with Switzerland where the most expensive material in the world is created, so Wikipedia seems sure, but I'm not so sure we can call it material because it is not made of normal matter,

this

material is the most rare and potentially the most dangerous on earth and scientists around the world are trying to figure out how to put it in a bottle and carry it down

antimatter

street, but what is

antimatter

and why is there so little of it? It is the rarest substance on earth. It is the rarest substance in the universe, but scientists theorize that the Big Bang should have created a universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and yet we look around us and see almost all matter.

Why, surprisingly, that's one of the biggest unanswered questions in physics and I'm going to dive into it. Hi, I'm Diana and you're watching physics, girl. I'm back in the US but recently traveled to Switzerland initially to speak at epfl in Lausanne but decided to stop by the most impressive scientific facility. earth so we're in geneva switzerland right now oh no i'm leaving we're in geneva switzerland

this

is the home of the united nations we're headed to the large hadron collider and I've never been and I'm really excited um okay so what? what is this room? This is some kind of storage locker area like wow wow, so only people with special access can enter here, so this is what they call the announcement room after the antiproton decelerator, the announcement, yeah, yeah and So, This decelerator is under us, under these concrete blocks.

You see these yellow billboards, yeah, that's the big ring that rotates, so the purpose of the hype room is to house this ring inside a concrete tunnel that slows down the antimatter particles and then there. They are experiments that study it We are doing the opposite of the rest We don't like protons We want the second proton We don't like accelerating We want to decelerate Everything is off right now for maintenance so we have to go down in the tunnel, wow, there is all this concrete in the cement, oh my gosh, I just went to Burning Man.

I feel like a lot of people were using these things, so the blue things are bending magnets, so they're usually in the corners of your ring. and they will spin your beam, you know, give it a kick or a spin, yes the red ones are the quadrupole magnets, okay and they are used to focus the beam, it's like legos, but instead each piece in the ring is an electromagnet giant, it's not a coincidence. that the antimatter factor is at

cern

, you need these super energetic particles driven by the massive particle accelerators at

cern

to create antimatter, just as they are generated, you have these collisions, you know, a huge amount of energy and from this you automatically have a side The product is antiproteins that are created and need to direct the antiprotons into the ad room using these giant coils of wire.

It's connected to some transformers that will send this current to the magnet so you can have this little kick from your beam so that everyone. That specialized equipment and the huge amounts of energy that goes into creating energetic particles are part of why antimatter is so expensive. in 2006. Antimatter

costs

about $25 billion per

gram

to make sounds that seem like a lot, but that's just positrons for antiprotons, according to some estimates. the cost is around 3

trillion

dollars per

gram

To find out why antimatter is so rare, we first have to see why it can be so dangerous when antimatter comes into contact with normal matter, they annihilate, disappear and become In pure light energy, if A teaspoon of antimatter came into contact with normal matter, it would create an explosion large enough to destroy all of Manhattan.

By comparison, it would take about 200,000 metric tons of TNT to release the same amount of energy or 10 nuclear bombs to do so even more. It is clear that the amount of antimatter that would be needed to destroy the moon would be equivalent to the same mass of all the fish on Earth, but let's be clear, the small amount of antimatter that we are able to produce with current technologies is not at all dangerous way, so what is antimatter? What is this thing that is capable of annihilating with normal matter? This

stuff

would look like normal matter if we had enough of it to see it.

Surprisingly, scientists predicted that antimatter should exist before it was discovered, which will help let's figure out what it is, this is what happened, you know, when you're solving the quadratic equation x equals negative b plus or minus square root, blah, blah blah, that more or less can give you two possible solutions, but sometimes you get a negative solution and you say ah, that doesn't make sense, I'm going to throw it out okay. In 1928, English physicist Paul Dirac was working on a mathematical equation that described the behavior of electrons as you do and ended up with two solutions instead of discarding the positive one.

He finally thought: What if this second solution described something real? It would be exactly like an electron with the same properties but with a positive charge. That would be crazy, but he predicted that this particle could exist according to mathematics as early as 1932 in one of his cloud chambers, you know, these tracks saw an electron with, let's say, the wrong charge, how crazy physics is, they discovered a new type of particle because it just came out of mathematics. American physicist Carl Anderson detected this opposite electron and later published a paper calling it. a positron and the name stuck on it, which makes me wish electrons were called negatrons, that would be cool now that we're in for a treat because unlike many experiments of the time, there's actually a photograph of the original positron passing through from a cloud chamber experiment in 1932. this line shows the path of the particle this was the first discovery of antimatter every matter particle has a brother or sister and has the same mass but has the opposite charge and opposite magnetic moment At least that's what our theories tell us.

So that's what antimatter is, but it's a bit of a boring description of antimatter because it ignores annihilation and all that, so in 1932 we had the first detection of antimatter, this same year at the quidditch match between the arrows from Applebee's. and the vultures it wasn't until 1995 that physicists created the first anti-hydrogen atom, why did it take so long? Well, annihilation is really difficult to work with material that you can never hold in your hand, you can't even touch your equipment or poof, it can't even touch the air or poof, so this factory in Europe their goal is to continue manufacturing and studying a material worth almost billions per ounce.

What are they studying well? There's a big question keeping scientists interested. Scientists don't know. Why antimatter is so rare, that is one of the great unanswered questions in physics of our time, so CERN experiments seek to study the properties of antimatter and see if they can find any difference between it and matter. normal. Some experiments are studying what will happen. when you release antimatter, it will go down like normal matter. Almost all physicists say yes. We suspect it will go down when you release it, but we've never done that experiment. Another experiment simply attempts to store antimatter in a container and transport it across the world. street, then this experiment is called puma.

They want to take this, you know, their antimatter bottle to a facility across the street and there they have different elements that are radioactive, so if you have antimatter interacting with this, you know you're going to get annihilations, but the properties of what arises from this annihilation will tell you something about how nutrients and protons were distributed in these nuclei, and several other experimental groups hope to study the spectral lines of antihydrogen and compare them to hydrogen so that we know exactly what colors hydrogen emits. but recently we were able to do the same type of spectroscopy by looking at the light coming out of antihydrogen and some experiments like the one Elisa is working on are measuring the properties of the antiprotons they have trapped to see if they are the same as the basic properties of protons are. purely antiprotons, so we normally have an antiproton reserve of about 200 antiprotons that we can store in this kind of panorama that you've seen and we can keep it.

The record was 400 years 400 years 400 years 400 days, so we take one antiproton at a time, put it in our measurement trap and try to measure its properties for charge, mass and magnetic moment, so that's the answer to our question of why there is so little antimatter in the universe that we do not know. I don't know yet, that's why all these really smart people are doing crazy experiments trying to figure it out at CERN and I'm so excited to follow them and see what they find because I know they'll find something. Thank you all very much for watching this video and happy anti-physics, you are the messiest boss I have ever had.

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