Antimatter

Antimatter’s great attraction from a propulsion standpoint is the ability to convert 100 percent of its mass into energy, a reaction impossible with fission or fusion methods. The trick, of course, is to find enough antimatter to use. We can produce it in particle accelerators but only in amounts that are vanishingly small. There is [...]

Those gamma rays coming out of galactic center, flagging the presence of an antimatter cloud of enormous extent, have spawned few explanations more exotic than the one we consider today: Black holes. Primordial black holes, in fact, produced in their trillions at the time of the Big Bang and left evaporating through so-called ‘Hawking radiation’ [...]

Robert Forward used to talk about antimatter factories in space, installations that would draw their power from the Sun. He would point out that at a distance of 1 AU, our star delivers a gigawatt of energy for each square kilometer of collector. And being Robert Forward, he thought big: Build a collector array one [...]

Great ideas fan out in unexpected directions, which is why James Bickford now looks at antimatter in a new light. Bickford (Draper Laboratory, Cambridge MA) realized that an adaptation of Robert Bussard’s interstellar ramscoop might have its uses in collecting antimatter. The concept grew out of the realization that antimatter sources were available not only [...]