Why is this important?

Antimatter exists around us. It’s not a theoretical construct. We’ve known about its existence for almost a century.

Antimatter is matters companion, virtually identical, but with an opposite charge.

An anti-electron is a positron, a positively charged particle that is the opposite of an electron. First discovered in 1932, positrons get created naturally when cosmic rays strike our upper atmosphere or when a bolt of lightning descends during a thunderstorm.

Today we harvest positrons from radioactive decay in nuclear reactors and use them to help us in radiology. PET scanners provide unique imaging that detects medical issues not easily discovered through other radio imaging technologies. And PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. It images the photons produced when positrons created from the radioactive decay of a dye injected into a patient collide with the body’s matter producing life-saving diagnostic results.

So what are the people at the CERN Large Hadron Collider doing with antimatter?

Since the Big Bang scientists suspect that matter and antimatter were both created in almost equal amounts. But most of what we see is matter. So we don’t know where all the antimatter has gone.

That’s why six different physics teams have developed rival antimatter experiments to unlock antimatter’s secrets and are using the facility at CERN because it has the horsepower to generate large volumes of antiprotons.

Antimatter particles are produced through radioactive decay and captured using decelerators to slow them down from near-light to 1/10th light speed. The antiprotons are trapped by electromagnetic fields that keep the particles in suspension. Beams of electrons act as heat exchangers to cool them down. The beams must never touch the antimatter. Nonetheless, there is considerable attrition.

A typical harvest of antiprotons will yield 30 million from smashing a target containing 12 trillion protons. But by the end of the process, a mere 30 antiprotons remain. The rest have escaped or been annihilated by matter.

Why studying antimatter matters

A good reason to study antimatter is to figure out where all of it went after the Big Bang. It appears that right from the start of our Universe, some asymmetric force has led to matter becoming predominant. In experimenting with antimatter we may be able to identify that source of asymmetry.

Another reason to study antimatter is to better understand what happens when it interacts with matter. Does it cause massive explosions as suggested in Dan Brown’s novel, “Angels & Demons?” If so is this something the military is studying so an antimatter-matter weapon can be produced?

More promising might be the use of antimatter to generate energy for the planet. What would an antimatter reactor and power plant look like? Essentially it would be similar to plants constructed for nuclear power generation. But instead of nuclear decay from fuel rods generating the heat to drive turbines, it would be the interaction of matter and antimatter within a containment field that would yield energy for light and heat.

And then there is the dream of faster-than-light-speed warp drive technology. This is the powerplant of Star Trek’s starships, engines that use streams of antimatter and matter within containment fields to provide a kinetic force so powerful it can warp space-time itself.

What’s the latest antimatter gossip? 

It seems that the newest experimental results coming from the scientists at CERN studying antihydrogen have just been published in the journal Nature. What the physicists have learned from this latest study is that our basic understanding of the Universe is correct; that something physicists call the Standard Model is verified by the behaviour of matter and antimatter; that the basic building blocks of the Universe do interact through four fundamental forces, gravity and elctromagnetism detected on a macro scale, think the interaction of stars, planets, and galaxies, and weak and strong forces detected on a micro scale, think the interaction of particles at a subatomic level.

We can be thankful for the physicists at Cern, who for the moment have dispelled the Dan Brown version of matter and antimatter. We, after all, are not going to be blown up by these two fundamental states colliding.

What the Heck is the Higgs Boson and What Does it Mean for Us in the 21st Century?

When scientists get excited about a discovery like the one announced this week it is hard not to jump on the bandwagon and acknowledge the progress made to unlock the mysteries of the Big Bang, matter, antimatter, dark matter, energy, dark energy and the quantum sub-atomic realm.

But what does the Higgs Boson particle discovery mean practically speaking? To answer this question you have to appreciate what this particle means to other sub-atomic particles. The Higgs Boson is the attractor that makes sub-atomic particles associate with each other. It acts like an invisible force field giving other particles their mass. Without the Higgs Boson electrons wouldn’t exist, and without electrons atoms wouldn’t exist, and without atoms we wouldn’t exist.

Consider the importance of electrons to our technical society (all of our energy and power generation is based on what electrons do) then it’s good to know our understanding of how things work in the universe is confirmed by this discovery.

Billions of dollars have been spent searching for the Higgs Boson as nations cooperated to build the Large Hadron Collider. And now with it built the Collider can make important contributions to science, and feed technology innovation in a number of fields from biomedicine, to manufacturing, to energy, computing and space science.

It’s hard not to argue that advances we have made in scientific discovery in the past have always led to new technology. So hats off to the scientists at CERN and to future discoveries from the Large Hadron Collider. And before I end this topic I leave you with the following:

Biomedicine Update: Move Over Higgs Boson as Researchers Discover Holy Grail of Tissue Engineering

Newts and other amphibians can regenerate lost limbs. Some reptiles can regenerate lost tails. Even humans can regenerate bone to heal fractures. But regenerating lost brain cells, heart muscle, or insulin-producing pancreatic cells has been only a dream until now.

Well according to the Journal, Comptes Rendus Biologies, scientists at the University of Paris Descartes and University of Maryland, adult bone marrow stem cells harvested from mice were used to generate multiple tissue types for use in cell replacement therapy.

If the mouse study can be replicated in humans we will have the ability to replace damaged organs without transplants and the need for immune suppressants.

Energy Update: Paint on Batteries

What if you could spray paint batteries on to any surface from a ceramic tile to a piece of paper? That’s exactly what researchers at Rice University, in Texas, hope to achieve. They have developed technology to spray-paint battery structures on surfaces. The anode and cathode, that is the negative and positive halves of the battery are kept apart using poly-methyl methacrylate. A sequence of five separate paint layers, each no more than 0.5 millimeters in thickness, makes a battery with efficiencies equivalent to the traditional lithium-ion batteries we use today in portable electronics. The flexibility these batteries provide should make them attractive to consumer-electronics and industrial manufacturers.

Materials Science Update: New Adhesives Created from Barnacles

Current adhesives are typically made from petroleum byproducts. But nature demonstrates adhesives with remarkable bonding capability, almost impossible to break. The Buoy Barnacle, Dosima Fascicularis, produces an adhesive that allows it to stick almost anywhere in the marine environment. Naturally its adhesive can cure under water.

So a research team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology in Bremen, Germany, is studying the barnacle to isolate the amino acids and proteins that constitute the properties of the adhesive with the goal to use it in medical applications such as closing surgical incisions, and supporting pins and screws in repairing bone fractures.

Space Science Update: Could We Build the U.S.S. Enterprise Today?

An engineer has proposed that much of the technology needed to build a starship like Enterprise exists today not including warp engine technology and transporters. For example we have technology today that was seen as futuristic in the 1960s when Star Trek first appeared on television. Touch screens, communicators, sliding doors, talking computers, and replicators (think 3D printers) are available to us today. Even impulse engines represent technology currently under development in NASA’s Advanced Propulsion Physics Laboratory.

Unlike the TV Enterprise, the one proposed would use a rotating structure in the saucer section of the spacecraft to create artificial gravity.

You can check out the website at BuildtheEnterprise.org.