Since, barring someone discovering "new physics" that allows matter Or plasmas, it will NOT be hard to ensure good mixing - especially If both the matter and antimatter are gases With matter virtually 100% of the time, so long as the bomb and/orĭetonation environment consists mostly of matter, and the matter andĪntimatter are well mixed. Hence, one is guaranteed that 100% of the antimatter WILL annihilate Temperature of the reactants, the annihilation efficiency will not. M/AM annihilation, by contrast, is NOT a chain reaction.įurthermore, while the annihilation rate will depend on the In the case of fusion bombs, the reaction is strongly temperature-Īnd density-dependent unless the reactants stay hot enough andĭense enough for long enough (Lawson criterion!), the reaction Itself" - and in this "disassembled" state, the chain reaction Incomplete "burn," since the bomb "catastrophically disassembles Hence, as you say, if the reaction gets going too slowly, one gets an I think I have to disagree with you on a number of points, Henry.įission bombs can "fizzle" because they rely on a chain reaction. Even more ordinary nuclear bombs can "fizzle" unless carefully designed: the reaction gets going but too slowly, so the bomb blows itself apart before the reaction can proceed very far. The common belief about the existence of a Leidenfrost effect in antimatter (ed note: Byron Coffey pointed out that I was being simplistic)īyron Coffey: I noticed an error in your section on antimatter weaponry. Naturally as the state-of-the-art of antimatter warhead design advances, this percentage will rise. You may get close to 100% of the antimatter reacting if you, say, drop the antimatter chunk onto a planet, but getting that efficiency with a warhead exploding in the matter-less depths of deep space is much more difficult. (Actually it will probably vaporize the bricks and blow the vapor away, which amounts to the same thing.) Which is perfectly placed to push the two bricks apart with incredible force, preventing the rest of the atoms and antiatoms from coming into contact. The atoms and antiatoms just on the surface will come into contact and annihilate each other. Making an explosion (in vacuum) is downright hard.Ĭonsider two bricks, one of matter and one of antimatter. An antimatter particle beam is more difficult. It is much easier to extract all the energy from a matter-antimatter reaction if you do it in a slow controlled fashion, say in a power plant or a propulsion system. The trouble is trying to use this as a bomb. Image from īut in practice it ain't gonna be anywhere near that much. It was named "photon" because at the time it was believed that an antimatter explosion would be pure gamma-ray photons. Photon Torpedo from original Star Trek (1966).
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