Antimatter: how the world's most expensive — and explosive — substance is made. It's the most expensive substance on Earth, costing quadrillions of dollars for a single gram. It's also likely the most explosive substance on the planet.
The cost of 1 gram of antimatter is about 62.5 trillion dollars (around 5,000 billion INR). In physics, antimatter is defined as the opposite of matter, having the same mass as matter but opposite electric charge. There are a lot of things in the world that are extremely expensive.
Scientific element: Francium
The most expensive and second rarest natural element.
Due to its explosive nature (it annihilates when in contact with normal matter) and energy-intensive production, the cost of making antimatter is astronomical. CERN produces about 1x10^15 antiprotons every year, but that only amounts to 1.67 nanograms.
Who knows its worth? Right now, antimatter – with a price tag of about $62.5 trillion per gram – is the most expensive substance on the Earth. When groups of people are asked to name the most expensive substance, the variety of answers is hilarious.
If 1kg of antimatter came into contact with 1kg of matter, the resulting explosion would be the equivalent of 43 megatons of TNT – about 3,000 times more powerful than the bomb that exploded over Hiroshima. Creating big explosions is not on the agenda for Hangst, however.
"One 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold," he says. After a bit of number crunching that means a gram of antiproton antimatter would cost an absurd 5 quadrillion euros. That's 5 thousand trillion euros.
A gram of antimatter could produce an explosion the size of a nuclear bomb. However, humans have produced only a minuscule amount of antimatter. All of the antiprotons created at Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator add up to only 15 nanograms.
Antimatter occurs in natural processes like cosmic ray collisions and some types of radioactive decay, but only a tiny fraction of these have successfully been bound together in experiments to form antiatoms.
Today, antimatter is primarily found in cosmic rays – extraterrestrial high-energy particles that form new particles as they zip into the Earth's atmosphere.
"At" stands for astatine. It is an element with 85 protons packed into its nucleus, thus the atomic number "85" ... The problem is, there's something about 85 protons in a tight space that nature doesn't enjoy.
Astatine is therefore the rarest element in the periodic table because it's the hardest to produce. So hard to produce, in fact, that the scientists who first created it in 1939 couldn't detect its existence directly and had to resort to a trick.
Astatine (At) is the rarest element in the world, but it's a gas and not used a great deal in everyday technology.
Lucky for us, antimatter is extremely rare.
Although it may sound like something out of science fiction, antimatter is real. Antimatter was created along with matter after the Big Bang. But antimatter is rare in today's universe, and scientists aren't sure why.
To make 1 g of antimatter - the amount made by Vetra in the movie - would therefore take about 1 billion years. The total amount of antimatter produced in CERN's history is less than 10 nanograms - containing only enough energy to power a 60 W light bulb for 4 hours.
For the past 50 years and more, laboratories like CERN have routinely produced antiparticles, and in 1995 CERN became the first laboratory to create anti-atoms artificially. But no one has ever produced antimatter without also obtaining the corresponding matter particles.
Scientists haven't seen anti-matter regions in our universe, but they have created copious amounts of antiparticles in particle accelerators and even created anti-elements and anti-atoms. We also know about antimatter from the anti-particles that cosmic ray collisions create.
Whatever the reason for such a small quantity of antimatter in today's universe, it is out there. Tiny quantities of antimatter rain down from cosmic rays and are quickly evaporated by interactions with matter. Anywhere high-energy collisions take place, antimatter is sure to be there.
In addition to the advantages related to its extremely high energy density and ease of ignition, annihilation has two important characteristics: the release of energy in a matter-antimatter explosion is extremely fast (ten to a thousand times shorter than a nuclear explosion), and most of the energy is emitted in the ...
Matter and antimatter particles are always produced as a pair and, if they come in contact, annihilate one another, leaving behind pure energy.
How much antimatter would our villain need to annihilate with "normal" matter in order to release the amounts of energy required for the destruction of Earth? Lots! Approximately 2.5 trillion tons of antimatter.
Physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York say they have created nuclei of antihelium-4 for the first time – the heaviest antimatter particles ever seen on Earth.
Antimatter weapons are currently too costly and unreliable to be viable in warfare, as producing antimatter is enormously expensive (estimated at $6 billion for every 100 nanograms), the quantities of antimatter generated are very small, and current technology has great difficulty containing antimatter, which ...
Antimatter is used in the medical field. Antiprotons are used to treat some types of cancer. Positrons are used in Positron Emission Topography or PET scans to create medical images.