Actually I saw this going down I-40 outside Nashville on Saturday.
Posted on 06/25/2013 10:10:32 AM PDT by Red Badger
(Phys.org) —An international team of physicists working at the University of Michigan has succeeded in building a tabletop antimatter "gun" capable of spewing short bursts of positrons. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team describes how they created the gun, what it's capable of doing, and to what use it may be put.
Positrons are anti-particles, the opposite twin of electrons. Besides being created in physics labs, they are also found in jets emitted by black holes and pulsars. To date, the creation of positrons for study has involved very big and expensive machines. One of those is the particle accelerator at CERN. Another is a device built by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that created positrons by firing a hugely powerful laser at a tiny disc made of gold. Other recent work by researchers at the University of Texas has involved building a desktop sized accelerator. This new effort builds on that work—this team has built a device not more than a meter long that is capable of generating short bursts of both electrons and positrons, very similar they report, to what is emitted by black holes and pulsars.
To achieve this feat, the team fired a petawatt laser at a sample of inert helium gas. Doing so caused the creation of a stream of electrons moving at very high speed. Those electrons were directed at a very thin sheet of metal foil which caused them to smash into individual metal atoms. Those collisions resulted in a stream of electron and positron emissions—the two were then separated using magnets.
The researchers report that each blast of their gun lasts just 30 femtoseconds, but each firing results in the production of quadrillions of positrons—a density level comparable to those produced at CERN. The researchers suggest their device could be used to mimic the jet streams from black holes and/or pulsars, hopefully offering some answers to questions such as, what sort of proportion of particles are present in such streams, how much energy is in them, and in what ways do the particles in them interact with the environment into which they are spewed.
More information: Table-Top Laser-Based Source of Femtosecond, Collimated, Ultrarelativistic Positron Beams, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 255002 (2013). prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v110/i25/e255002 . On Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/1304.5379
Abstract The generation of ultrarelativistic positron beams with short duration (τe+≃30 fs), small divergence (θe+≃3 mrad), and high density (ne+≃1014–1015 cm-3) from a fully optical setup is reported. The detected positron beam propagates with a high-density electron beam and γ rays of similar spectral shape and peak energy, thus closely resembling the structure of an astrophysical leptonic jet. It is envisaged that this experimental evidence, besides the intrinsic relevance to laser-driven particle acceleration, may open the pathway for the small-scale study of astrophysical leptonic jets in the laboratory.
via Synopsis
No, that was red mercury - or was it the Russians?
Only usable in space since positrons would hit and annihilate atmospheric particles rather than the target. Someone is sure to look at scaling this up.
A story I read a couple of decades ago in Omni:
100 years in the future, we live in a world with a computer network very similar to what we call the internet. Some guys are mining the astroid belt, which have been determined to be the remains of a blown up planet.
They come across an artificially made device the size of a football. They bring it to the head office and notice it is some sort of electronic device with computing capabilities so they plug it into their computer, effectively plugging it’s contents into the world’s computers. It dumps its data on their computer screen.
It is instructions on how to blow up a planet using simple ingredients and tools found around the house.
The end...
Obama needs to get one to al qaeda ASAP, it’s the only way to ensure world peace!
Well if they can just figure how to bottle it, work on that duration some, we might have a product we could export to the Chinese for their Mars shuttle!
Biden already has added it to his list to ban.
“...they are also found in jets emitted by black holes and pulsars...”
Let’s just hope we really understand how this works: black holes emit jets of positrons and not the other way around :-)
The Founders never would have written the Second Amendment had they known about anti-matter guns.
Encapsulate the anti-matter into a photon torpedo. :-)
What else?
A phased plasma rifle in a 40 watt range.
Just what you see pal...
Actually I saw this going down I-40 outside Nashville on Saturday.
Did anyone happen to notice that one of the ‘side effects’ of this ‘gun’ is the production of GAMMA RAYS?...................
The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse by John Ringo, discusses Moores Law as it applies to genetic engineering equipment, and what happens when any biology grad student can create his own plague.
Must have been headed to the Pawn Stars shop..................
Eventually some HS kid will make one in his garage and become the next Steve Jobs..........iGun.........
Kinda difficult to find ammo for that these days.................
it’s only a short hop from this to a “thimble nuke” ;).
*** has succeeded in building a tabletop antimatter “gun” capable of spewing short bursts of positrons.***
Isn’t that the weapon used by Jane Fonda in BARBARELLA!
Did anyone notice this device is powered by a "petawatt laser", where "petawatt" is defined as a billion megawatts?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.