Antimatter bomb - A million-billion-dollar destructive weapon

Antimatter is a deadly, powerful and unstoppable weapon, however, according to scientists, there is no technology to turn antimatter into a weapon.

In the novel "Angel and Devil" by Dan Brown, a bomb containing only a quarter of an antimatter threatens to erase the Vatican. However, according to Rolf Landua, a physicist at the European Nuclear Research Organization (CERN), that scenario cannot be realized in the near future.

"The total amount of antimatter we make for 30 years at CERN is about 10 billion grams. The explosion caused by it on your fingertips is not more dangerous than turning on a match , " he said.

Simulation of antimatter bomb explosion.(Graphic: Keson).

Antimatter is made up of fundamental antiparticles such as antiparticles, neutron antiparticles, . In theory, if antimatter meets matter, it will explode, releasing tremendous energy. In 2002, CERN first created anti-hydrogen atoms from antiprotons and positrons in an ambient temperature of zero absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius). At high temperatures, the antimatter will combine with the atoms of the environment and disappear immediately.

Even if physicists create enough antimatter to build a bomb, the cost will be immense.

" A gram of antimatter can cost up to a million billion dollars , " according to Landua. Time is also a big problem. According to Frank Close, a particle physicist at Oxford University, it takes up to 10 billion years to produce enough antimatter for the bomb that Dan Brown mentioned.

"The only way to create antimatter bombs is to find the amount of antimatter that nature has produced over billions of years. If not, with the progress each time create an antimatter atom, Energy consumption will be billions of times the amount of energy collected , " Landua said.

Scientists are currently studying how to use antimatter for peaceful purposes. In 2007, for the first time, molecules formed by many positronium atoms (an atom composed of an electron and a positron) were successfully created, by two physicists David Cassidy and Allen Mills, University of California. Positronium will quickly destroy itself, turning into high-energy gamma rays. Therefore, if there are many positroniums, it is possible to create an extremely large array of gamma lasers, which can be used to photograph small objects of the atomic nucleus or activate a fusion reactor.