Why Is Antimatter So Expensive?

Matter is everything around us. It’s you, me, plants, cars and it’s everywhere. Matter is considered every physical substance in the universe. If it has mass, its matter. The opposite of matter is anti-matter. During the Big Bang, the universe should have created equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. However, there is excess matter everywhere and no traces of anti-matter. Nobody really know why this has happened and it is one of the biggest mysteries of the universe.

To most people, anti-matter is going to sound like science fiction but actually anti-matter is a science fact. Currently we don’t have a theory that predicts it or describes its behaviour to us. So everything we know about it comes from experiment. Now anti-matter and matter are really similar. They don’t differ by very much. An antimatter version of matter just has the opposite charge.

There’s one very good diagnostic for when you have antimatter around and that’s because when you have anti-matter meeting matter, it annihilates, releasing enormous amounts of energy. To give an idea on how much energy is released, if a quarter of a gram of normal matter meets a quarter of a gram of antimatter, it releases an explosive force of 5 kilo tonnes of TNT.

Now you might have thought of why we aren’t using this energy as a power source and solve world’s energy crisis. Well the main reason is because antimatter is the most expensive substance on earth. NASA estimates it would cost about 100 billion dollars to make just 1/1000^TH of a gram of it. It’s so expensive because it is rare and so expensive to produce.

One of the base rule of old physics is matter cannot be created or destroyed but however this is exactly true in this case. In fact, when an electron hits a positron, they annihilate one another, turning into energy in the form of gamma rays at 511 kilo electron volts. So in other words, energy cannot be created or destroyed because matter and energy are the same.

In order to study the anti-matter in labs, we need to capture it and store. This is an extremely difficult task as everything on earth is matter and we cannot let them both come into contact. But now, scientists were able to make a major breakthrough. In 2002, the Alpha collaboration team at CERN announced they trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms for 172 milliseconds each. But that obviously isn’t enough time to study it. Then in 2010, scientists trapped hundreds of antimatter atoms for more than 15 minutes giving them enough time to explore and study it.

Scientists are also making use of super computers to try and figure out the tiny differences between the two. If antimatter can be produced in a cost efficient and controlled manner, it’s extremely useful. It can be used to power spaceships in the future and generating an unlimited power source to solve our energy crisis. And most importantly, learning anti matter could give us the ultimate answer to the Big Bang.