On Thu, 2 Sep 2010, Darryl or Natalia wrote: > Pete, > > Thanks for the clarification. Good luck with your work! > > I dug up the following at the CERN site. > Natalia
Hmm, interesting; the CERN flaks have failed arithmetic: > > http://livefromcern.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/academy/AM-travel01b.html [...] > > Here at CERN we can produce 50 millions antiprotons in each cycle (about once > a minute), that allows us to make a few hundred antihydrogen atoms. > > The number could be 10 times higher in particular configurations of the > accelerator. This sounds a lot, but expressed in grams it is a billionth of a > gram in a year. OK, let's check that: 10 times higher than a few hundred is a few thou, so let's say 5 thou per beam bucket. One bucket per minute, 1440 minutes per day, 200 operating days per year typically, gives 5x10^3x1440x200=~1.5x10^9 per year, and a gram is 6x10^23, so about 4 x 10^14 years, ie 400 trillion, not one billion. And consequently less than one one-hundred-trillionth gram per year. (Yes, 50 million are generated per cycle, but the process of capture and containment is so inefficient that only ~5k might be optimistically projected to be available). Note that up to the present (err, OK, the last time I asked), none have actually been captured - they've just been sent into the trap and detected as they drifted through it and anihilated against the walls. About another factor of 1000 in energy of motion has to be removed from the neutral anti-atoms before they will stay in the trap. It's being worked on... -Pete _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
