Popularized by the book Angels and Demons by author Dan Brown, antimatter bombs have been used by science fiction writers for decades. Often considered the most powerful and destructive weapons that humans could develop, these bombs echo the mysterious interest that antimatter arouses among scientists and the general public alike. However, are such bombs really feasible?
Rolf Landua, physicist at CERN, quickly tempers the threat. “If you add up all the antimatter we have made in over 30 years of antimatter physics here at CERN, you could get 10 billionths of a gram. Even if it exploded at your fingertip, it would be no more dangerous than lighting a match “, he explains. Patients undergoing PET scans have naturally occurring radioactive atoms present in their bloodstream emitting tens of millions, if not more, of positrons, with no ill effect.
For comparison, 450 grams of antimatter is equivalent to about 19 megatons of TNT. So yes, antimatter would be more powerful than other explosives, but not as catastrophic as some sources indicate. Even if physicists could manufacture enough antimatter to build a viable bomb, the cost would be astronomical. “A gram can cost a million billion dollars says Landua.
"That's probably more than any president or head of state wants to invest at the moment ". Frank Close, a particle physicist at the University of Oxford, also points to the problem of time. “It would take us 10 billion years to assemble enough antimatter to make the bomb that Dan Brown talks about in his book 'Angels and Demons ’”.
There is, however, a very slim possibility that we could build some sort of antimatter bomb. It just wouldn't be powered by a blast of pure antimatter. Antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion would have to be used. This essentially uses small-scale antimatter explosions to trigger "tiny" nuclear explosions. Ideally, groups like NASA would like to use these methods to propel spacecraft.
The technology could also theoretically be used to create small, fission-free (very low nuclear fallout) weapons. This would cause less long-term contamination than conventional nuclear weapons, while having the same strategic impact. But weapons would still cost billions unless we found a more natural source of antimatter to harvest.
That said, the quantities needed for this type of device (10 to 13 grams of antimatter, or 10 11 anti-hydrogen atoms) are significantly more feasible than those required for pure antimatter weapons. However, the question of the storage of this quantity of antimatter prevails. We just don't have the technology to make it safe, even if we could acquire it somehow.
The US Air Force, according to this source citing the study published by RAND Corporation, has been funding research into antimatter weapons since at least 1983. The four main categories of applications they have studied are propulsion, generators energy sources, directed energy weapons, and "classified additional special military roles" — aka, antimatter-triggered bombs.
It seems that the most viable use for antimatter is for fuel. NASA's interest stems from the fact that antimatter could be the ultimate rocket fuel. The current estimate is that antimatter could get us to Mars in 6 weeks, as the Penn State design team predicted.
Using a tiny amount of antimatter to trigger a nuclear reaction — Antimatter Initiation Microfusion (AIM) — can be an excellent catalyst for bombs, but it can also be used in theory to power spaceships. Matter-antimatter annihilation releases more energy per unit mass than any known reaction in physics. A spacecraft powered by this method would require as little as one microgram of antimatter, depending on the duration of the mission.
AIM is also extremely effective. The energy released when matter and antimatter collide is about 10 billion times the amount released by the traditional combustion of hydrogen and oxygen. However, storage continues to be the main roadblock in all of these major projects.
