Neither gold nor diamonds, the world’s costliest material is a substance known as antimatter that costs an estimated USD 62.5 trillion (Rs 62.5 lakh crore) a gram. A gram of it packs a punch of explosive energy equivalent to four Hiroshima-class nuclear weapons and is costlier than India’s entire budget put together-Rs 50 lakh crore.
Antimatter is a state precisely opposite to ordinary matter, comprising everything we can think about: stars, water, and even ourselves.
The Physics Of Annihilation
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Antimatter is made up of antiparticles. For example, an ordinary electron has a negative charge (-), while its antiparticle, the anti-electron or positron, has a positive charge (+).
100% Conversion: When a particle of matter and a particle of antimatter meet, they instantly annihilate each other; the whole mass is converted into 100% pure energy, leaving no smoke or ash, only intense light and heat.
Energy Density: The energy released by the reaction of just 1 gm each of antimatter and matter would come to 43 kilotons of TNT, which is enough to power the whole country of India for 10-12 days.
The Billion-Dollar Production Challenge
The production of antimatter, as powerful as it is, is an extravagantly hard and expensive operation.
Current Production: The total from all global experiments since 1995 amounts to about 10 nanograms, or 0.00000001 grams of antimatter. This quantity is so small it would not have been enough to light one bulb for one second, yet billions have gone into the production process.
Made Where: Antimatter is created in specialized labs by smashing particles against each other at 99.999% of the speed of light. Key sites include CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss-French border, Fermilab in the US, and Germany’s GSI Helmholtz Center.
Storing the Unstorable
Since antimatter annihilates in contact with any ordinary material, storing it requires advanced technology:
Extreme Cooling: It has to be cooled almost to -273 degrees Celsius. It contains the property that pure translation operators can only be written in terms of pure boost operators.
Magnetic Confinement: These are levitated in a vacuum by strong magnetic and electric fields, which incidentally is called a Penning Trap, without the particles ever touching the walls of the container.
World Record: In 2011, a world record for keeping anti-hydrogen atoms alive for 16 minutes and 40 seconds was successfully set by CERN, whereby 309 atoms were kept.
The Revolutionary Future Of Antimatter
According to the scientists, if the cost and safety challenges can be surmounted, antimatter may become the game-changer of human civilisation:
Interstellar Travel: Antimatter rockets can forever change the face of space travel. According to NASA, only 10 milligrams of antimatter would be needed to send a spacecraft all the way to Pluto. Travel to Mars, which presently takes 7–9 months, could be shortened to a mere month.
Infinite Energy: This is due to the complete conversion of mass to energy, which presents a very viable and sustainable means of clean energy.
Medical Applications: Anti-electrons, or positrons, are already being used in PET scans. The future could bring the potential use of antiprotons, targeting cancer cells much more precisely than is currently possible with electrons or X-rays.
Fun Fact: Scientists are still searching for the majority of the antimatter that was created alongside matter in the Big Bang, since its near-total absence in the observable universe remains one of cosmology’s biggest mysteries.
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