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Date: Sat, 04 Apr 1998 09:46:48 -0500
Subject: UFO UpDate: Re: Antimatter Power No Longer Science Fiction
Message-ID: 
From: Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk (Stig Agermose)
To: updates@globalserve.net
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 1998 06:08:59 +0100
Subject: Antimatter Power No Longer Science Fiction
>From Sightings On The Radio's website:
http://www.sightings.com/ufo/antimatter.htm
*******
Antimatter Power No Longer Science Fiction
Discovery News Brief
3-31-98
Researchers believe they can now produce a form of antimatter,
which could one day be used to propel spacecraft, according to
the U.K.'s The Guardian newspaper.
Results of antimatter experiments, the power behind the fictional
warp drive on Star Trek's USS Enterprise, are due out this week.
Researchers from Fermilab, the U.S. Department of Energy's
particle accelerator laboratory in Illinois, think it's possible
to create atoms of antihydrogen with an efficiency that allows
them to at least study its properties and investigate ways in
which it could be put to use.
Antimatter is comprised of antiparticles that have the same mass
and spin as their particle counterparts but have opposite charge.
When antimatter comes into contact with "normal" matter, the two
states annihilate each other, producing pure energy. Its
potential has long been known in science fiction, but it had yet
to be taken seriously since antimatter doesn't naturally exist on
Earth and is extremely difficult to make.
Current experimental methods produce high energy anti-atoms
traveling at enormous speeds. One of the researchers' next aims
is to produce antimatter that is almost stationary, allowing it
to be trapped and held within a "magnetic bottle." Confined in
this way, the antihydrogen could be transported into space to
provide power for extended missions.
As yet, the quantities required for matter-antimatter energy
creation can't be made, according to The Guardian.
"If you want to use pure antimatter for propulsion you need
milligrams and more, and we simply don't have that yet," says
Gerald Smith of Pennsylvania State University's Laboratory for
Elementary Particle Science.
Instead, Smith is proposing that smaller quantities of
antihydrogen could be used to trigger nuclear fusion reactions.
"You could store a microgram of antihydrogen and take it into
space," he says. "That would be enough for a mission."
Producing a microgram of antihydrogen is not beyond the realms of
possibility, and storage methods are already being developed.
Funded by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the US Air Force,
the Pennsylvania researchers are currently building a prototype
antimatter trap. They also plan to confine antiprotons, one of
the constituents of antihydrogen, within similar magnetic
bottles.
These antiprotons are easier to produce than antihydrogen (but
more difficult to trap) and could, like antihydrogen, be used to
catalyze nuclear fusion reactions for space propulsion.
For the moment, producing enough antimatter for space propulsion
is not on Fermilab's agenda -- federal funds are currently
directed towards making antihydrogen as a means of testing
fundamental theories of physics.
"There are not going to be applications that come directly out of
this; it has more to do with the theories we have about the
properties of physical matter," says David Christian of the
Fermilab team.
Having improved their production methods, the Fermilab
researchers are now ready to begin a serious investigation of
antihydrogen's properties, The Guardian reports.
They are developing ways of examining the light emitted by
antihydrogen atoms when its electrons return to their standard
energy levels after being forced into "excited states."
Hydrogen's behavior in this area is extremely well understood.
If antihydrogen's behavior turns out to be even slightly
different, physicists would have to rethink or abandon many
established theories describing the symmetry between matter and
antimatter in the universe.
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