NASA: Thunderstorm's create anti-matter

[wxmeddler]

January 10, 2011

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected beams of antimatter launched by thunderstorms. Acting like enormous particle accelerators, the storms can emit gamma-ray flashes, called TGFs, and high-energy electrons and positrons. Scientists now think that most TGFs produce particle beams and antimatter.

http://www.nasa.gov/...nderstorms.html (Video in link)

[Carvers Gap]

January 10, 2011

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected beams of antimatter launched by thunderstorms. Acting like enormous particle accelerators, the storms can emit gamma-ray flashes, called TGFs, and high-energy electrons and positrons. Scientists now think that most TGFs produce particle beams and antimatter.

http://www.nasa.gov/...nderstorms.html (Video in link)

That's pretty awesome.

[AtticaFanatica]

This is relevant to my interests.

[wederwarrior]

my mind was just blown....

That is truly amazing.

I have nothing to add intellectually at this time...

[WxUSAF]

Wow, amazing. The best discoveries are the ones that are truly unexpected.

[Sean]

January 10, 2011

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected beams of antimatter launched by thunderstorms. Acting like enormous particle accelerators, the storms can emit gamma-ray flashes, called TGFs, and high-energy electrons and positrons. Scientists now think that most TGFs produce particle beams and antimatter.

http://www.nasa.gov/...nderstorms.html (Video in link)

Dammit Scotty , just get me more power!

I Captain...

[Brianonymous]

I wonder if that has anything to do with Sprites... Have they ever figured out what those are all about?

[crossthread]

I wonder if that has anything to do with Sprites... Have they ever figured out what those are all about?

That was My first thought also...

[TXWXCHX]

Dammit Scotty , just get me more power!

I Captain...

I feel bad because my first thought was "Wow, now we can move on to Warp Drive Engines"...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/0504_060504_antimatter.html

Consider my mind officially blown:

During one TGF, which occurred on Dec. 14, 2009, Fermi was located over Egypt. But the active storm was in Zambia, some 2,800 miles to the south. The distant storm was below Fermi's horizon, so any gamma rays it produced could not have been detected.

"Even though Fermi couldn't see the storm, the spacecraft nevertheless was magnetically connected to it," said Joseph Dwyer at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla. "The TGF produced high-speed electrons and positrons, which then rode up Earth's magnetic field to strike the spacecraft."

The beam continued past Fermi, reached a location, known as a mirror point, where its motion was reversed, and then hit the spacecraft a second time just 23 milliseconds later. Each time, positrons in the beam collided with electrons in the spacecraft. The particles annihilated each other, emitting gamma rays detected by Fermi's GBM.

[vinylfreak89]

very cool... i love these unique ways to prove ideas in theoretical physics.

[turtlehurricane]

Very interesting, and also very simple and logical. Hopefully this can be capitalized upon, perhaps to remotely detect thunderstorms from space.

Never thought antimatter physics would be relevant to meteorology, but that's the beauty of science when it's done right, everything comes together!

[turtlehurricane]

Also, this shows that thunderstorms are directly related to earth's magnetic field. The ensemble of them and their geographic distribution (mostly towards the equator) therefore may impact it. I recall reading a paper about thunderstorms and earth's magnetic field in the past, but don't remember the title or the specific findings, just that they are important.

[dsaur]

Yeah... red sprites and blue jets...that was my first thought also. T

[A-L-E-X]

This is relevant to my interests.

There's also Bose Einstein Condensate that's created in the upper atmosphere by high energy cosmic rays. There might be some strange matter floating around up there (including free quarks and gluons)

The amazing thing about these high energy cosmic rays is that their source might be active galactic nuclei and they might have traveled over 300 million light years to get here! There is also an idea that they are involved with natural climate change, based on the sun's revolution around the center of the galaxy and the relative position of the galactic arms, which is a 500 million year cycle.

http://en.wikipedia....nergy_particles

Cosmic rays with even higher energies have since been observed. Among them was the Oh-My-God particle (a play on the nickname "God particle" for the Higgs boson) observed on the evening of 15 October 1991 over Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. Its observation was a shock to astrophysicists, who estimated its energy to be approximately 3×1020 eV[3]

(50 joules)—in other words, a subatomic particle with kinetic energy equal to that of a baseball (142 g or 5 ounces) traveling at 96 km/h (60 mph).

It was most probably a proton with a speed very close to the speed of light. In fact, the proton was traveling so close to the speed of light, [(1 − 5×10−24) × c], that in a year-long

race between light and the cosmic ray, the ray would fall behind only 46 nanometers (5×10−24 light-years), or 0.15 femtoseconds (1.5×10

−16 s).[4]

The energy of this particle is some 40 million times that of the highest energy protons that can currently be produced in any particle accelerator. However only a small fraction of this energy would be available for an interaction with a proton or neutron on Earth, with most of the energy remaining in the form of kinetic energy of the products of the interaction. The effective energy available for such a collision is the square root of double the product of the particle's energy and the mass energy of the proton, which for this particle gives 7.5×1014 eV, roughly 50 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider.

Since the first observation, by the University of Utah's Fly's Eye Cosmic Ray Detector, at least fifteen similar events have been recorded, confirming the phenomenon. These very high energy cosmic rays are very rare; the energy of most cosmic rays is between 10 MeV and 10 GeV.

Active galactic cores as one possible source of the particles

The source of such high energy particles has been a mystery for many years. Recent results from the Pierre Auger Observatory show that ultra-high-energy cosmic ray arrival directions appear to be correlated with extragalactic supermassive black holes at the center of nearby galaxies called active galactic nuclei (AGN).[5] Interactions with blue-shifted cosmic microwave background radiation limit the distance that these particles can travel before losing energy; this is known as the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit or GZK limit.

AGN have been proposed as likely sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, and results from the Pierre Auger Observatory suggest that these objects may be their source. However, since the angular correlation scale is fairly large (3 degrees or more) these results do not unambiguously identify the origins of such cosmic rays. In particular, the AGN could merely be closely associated with the actual sources, which may be found, for example, in galaxies or other astrophysical objects that are clumped with matter on large scales within 100 Mpc.

Additional data collection will be important for further investigating a possible AGN source for these highest energy particles, which might be protons accelerated to those energies by magnetic fields associated with the rapidly growing black holes at the AGN centers. According to a recent study,[6] short-duration AGN flares resulting from the tidal disruption of a star or from a disk instability can be the main source of the observed flux of super GZK cosmic rays.

Some of the supermassive black holes in AGN are known to be rotating, as in the Seyfert galaxy MCG 6-30-15[7] with time-variability in their inner accretion disks.[8] Black hole spin is a potentially effective agent to drive UHECR production,[9] provided ions are suitably launched to circumvent limiting factors deep within the nucleus, notably curvature radiation[10] and inelastic scattering with radiation from the inner disk. Low-luminosity, intermittent Seyfert galaxies may meet the requirements with the formation of a linear accelerator several light years away from the nucleus, yet within their extended ion tori whose UV radiation ensures a supply of ionic contaminants.[11] The corresponding electric fields are commensurably small, on the order of 10 V/cm, whereby the observed UHECRs are indicative for the astronomical size of the source. Improved statistics by the Pierre Auger Observatory will be instrumental in identifying the presently tentative association of UHECRs (from the Local Universe) with Seyferts and LINERs.[12]

Other possible sources of the UHECR are:[13]

radio lobes of powerful radio galaxies

intergalactic shocks created during the epoch of galaxy formation

hypernovae

gamma-ray bursts

decay products of supermassive particles from topological defects, left over from phase transitions in the early universe

Particles undergoing the Penrose effect.

[edit]

Relation with dark matter

Main article: Dark matter

[edit]

Conversion of dark matter into ultra-high-energy particles

It is hypothesized that active galactic nuclei are capable of converting dark matter into high energy protons. Yuri Pavlov and Andrey Grib at the Alexander Friedmann Laboratory for Theoretical Physics at St. Petersburg hypothesize that dark matter particles are about 15 times heavier than protons, and that they can decay into pairs of particles of a type that interacts with ordinary matter.[14]

Near an active galactic nucleus, one of these particles can fall into the black hole, while the other escapes, as described by the Penrose process. Some of the particles that escape will collide with incoming particles creating collisions of very high energy. It is in these collisions, according to Pavlov, that ordinary visible protons can form. These protons would have very high energies. Pavlov claims that evidence of this is present in the form of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.[15]

[edit]

Dark matter particles as ultra-high-energy particles

High energy cosmic rays traversing intergalactic space suffer the GZK cutoff above 1020 eV due to interactions with cosmic background radiation if the primary cosmic ray particles are protons or nuclei. The Pierre Auger Project, HiRes and Yakutsk Extensive Air Shower Array found the GZK cutoff, while Akeno-AGASA observed the events above the cutoff (11 events in the past 10 years). The result of the Akeno-AGASA experiment is smooth near the GZK cutoff energy. If one assumes that the Akeno-AGASA result is correct and consider its implication, a possible explanation for the AGASA data on GZK cutoff violation would be a shower caused by dark matter particles. A dark matter particle is not constrained by the GZK cutoff, since it interacts weakly with cosmic background radiation. Recent measurements by the Pierre Auger Project have found a correlation between the direction of high energy cosmic rays and the location of AGN.[16]

Proposed sites for this type of acceleration include gamma ray bursts and active galactic nuclei.[1] Indeed, recent analysis of cosmic ray measurements with the Pierre Auger Observatory suggests a correlation between the arrival directions of cosmic rays of the highest energies of more than 5×1019 eV and the positions of nearby active galaxies.[2]

Cosmic rays can have energies of over 1020 eV, far higher than the 1012 to 1013 eV that man-made particle accelerators can produce. (See Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays for a description of the detection of a single particle with an energy of about 50 J, the same as a well-hit tennis ball at 42 m/s [about 150 km/h].) There has been interest in investigating cosmic rays of even greater energies.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_rays#Changes_in_Atmospheric_Chemistry

Role in lightning

Cosmic rays have been implicated in the triggering of electrical breakdown in lightning. It has been proposed that essentially all lightning is triggered through a relativistic process, "runaway breakdown", seeded by cosmic ray secondaries. Subsequent development of the lightning discharge then occurs through "conventional breakdown" mechanisms.[18]

[edit]

Role in climate change

A role of cosmic rays directly or via solar-induced modulations in climate change was suggested by E.P.Ney in 1959 and by Robert Dickinson in 1975. In recent years, the idea has been revived most notably by Henrik Svensmark; the most recent IPCC study disputed the mechanism,[19] while the most comprehensive review of the topic to date states: "evidence for the cosmic ray forcing is increasing as is the understanding of its physical principles."[20]

Geochemical and astrophysical evidence

Carbon dioxide concentrations on 500 million year scale[25]

Climate change on 500 million year scale

Nir Shaviv has argued that climate signals on geological time scales are attributable to changing positions of the galactic spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, and that cosmic ray flux variability is the dominant "climate driver" over these time periods.[26] Nir Shaviv and Jan Veizer in 2003[27] argue, that in contrast to a carbon based scenario, the model and proxy based estimates of atmospheric CO2 levels especially for the early Phanerozoic (see diagrams) do not show correlation with the paleoclimate picture that emerged from geological criteria, while cosmic ray flux would do.

A comprehensive study of different research institutes was published 2007 by Scherer et al. in Space Science Reviews 2007.[29] The study combines geochemical evidence both on temperature, cosmic rays influence and as well astrophysical deliberations suggesting a major role in climate variability over different geological time scales. Proxy data of CRF influence comprise among others isotopic evidence in sediments on the Earth and as well changes in (iron) meteorites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png

[A-L-E-X]

very cool... i love these unique ways to prove ideas in theoretical physics.

The universe is just one huge particle accelerator. We have yet to find out what causes extremely high energy cosmic rays... but we might be getting closer to discovering a new particle-- sterile neutrinos-- which have been predicted in theory, but some recent evidence suggests they're produced inside pulsars, like the one in the Crab Nebula.

[A-L-E-X]

Also, this shows that thunderstorms are directly related to earth's magnetic field. The ensemble of them and their geographic distribution (mostly towards the equator) therefore may impact it. I recall reading a paper about thunderstorms and earth's magnetic field in the past, but don't remember the title or the specific findings, just that they are important.

Hmmm, I wonder how the impending magnetic reversal will impact this. Also ball lightning (which has been somewhat simulated in the lab) might be a byproduct.

[A-L-E-X]

New Subatomic Particle Could Help Explain the Mystery of Dark Matter

A flurry of evidence reveals that "sterile neutrinos" are not only real but common, and could be the stuff of dark matter

By Michael Moyer | January 6, 2011

HIDDEN CLUE: Pulsars, including one inside this "guitar nebula," provide evidence of sterile neutrinos. Image: Courtesy of Shami Chatterjee and James M. Cordes Cornell University

Neutrinos are the most famously shy of particles, zipping through just about everything—your body, Earth, detectors specifically designed to catch them—with nary a peep. But compared with their heretofore hypothetical cousin the sterile neutrino, ordinary neutrinos are veritable firecrackers. Sterile neutrinos don’t even interact with ordinary matter via the weak force, the ephemeral hook that connects neutrinos to the everyday world. Recently, however, new experiments have revealed tantalizing evidence that sterile neutrinos are not only real but common. Some of them could even be the stuff of the mysterious dark matter astronomers have puzzled over for decades.

Physicists aren’t quite ready to make such dramatic pronouncements, but the results "will be extremely important—if they turn out to be correct,” says Alexander Kusenko of the University of California, Los Angeles.

How did scientists go about looking for particles that are virtually undetectable? Kusenko and Michael Loewenstein of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center reasoned that if sterile neutrinos really are dark matter, they would occasionally decay into ordinary matter, producing a lighter neutrino and an x-ray photon, and it would make sense to search for these x-rays wherever dark matter is found. Using the Chandra x-ray telescope, they observed a nearby dwarf galaxy thought to be rich in dark matter and found an intriguing bump of x-rays at just the right wavelength.

Another piece of evidence comes from supernovae. If sterile neutrinos really do exist, supernovae would shoot them out in a tight stream along magnetic field lines, and the recoil from this blast would kick the pulsars out through the cosmos. It turns out astronomers observe precisely that: pulsars whizzing through the universe at speeds of thousands of kilometers a second.

Astronomers don’t have to rely on the skies for evidence of sterile neutrinos, though. Scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory recently verified a 16-year-old experiment that sought the first evidence of these particles. The Fermilab scientists fired ordinary neutrinos through Earth at a detector half a kilometer away. They found that in flight, many of these neutrinos changed their identities in just the way they should if sterile neutrinos do in fact exist.

The next step is to confirm the results. Loewenstein and Kusenko recently repeated their experiment on another space-based x-ray telescope, the XMM-Newton, and Fermilab scientists are also setting up another run. The shyest elementary particles may not be able to evade their seekers for long.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-whole-lot-of-nothing

[A-L-E-X]

btw something to consider for the future (maybe far into the future lol) is the fact that matter-antimatter annihilation is the ultimate energy source and perhaps we might be looking at a way to generate and utilize these interactions on a large enough scale to provide a great source of energy and propulsion in the future.

[A-L-E-X]

I wonder if that has anything to do with Sprites... Have they ever figured out what those are all about?

That was My first thought also...

I find these the most intriguing of all:

http://en.wikipedia....g#Gigantic_jets

Gigantic jets

On September 14, 2001, scientists at the Arecibo Observatory photographed a gigantic jet—double the height of those previously observed—reaching around 70 km (43 miles) into the atmosphere.[13] The jet was located above a thunderstorm over an ocean, and lasted under a second. The jet was initially observed to be traveling up at around 50,000 m/s in a way similar to a typical blue jet but then split in two and sped at 250,000 m/s[dubious – discuss]to the ionosphere whence they spread out in a bright burst of light.

On July 22, 2002, five gigantic jets between 60 and 70 km (35 to 45 miles) in length were observed over the South China Sea from Taiwan, reported in Nature.[14][15] The jets lasted under a second, with shapes likened by the researchers to giant trees and carrots.

Blue jets

Blue jets differ from sprites in that they project from the top of the cumulonimbus above a thunderstorm, typically in a narrow cone, to the lowest levels of the ionosphere 40 to 50 km (25 to 30 miles) above the earth. In addition, whereas red sprites tend to be associated with significant lightning strikes, blue jets do not appear to be directly triggered by lightning (they do, however, appear to relate to strong hail activity in thunderstorms).[7] They are also brighter than sprites and, as implied by their name, are blue in color. The color is believed to be due to a set of blue and near-ultraviolet emission lines from neutral and ionized molecular nitrogen. They were first recorded on October 21, 1989, on a monochrome video of a thunderstorm on the horizon taken from the Space Shuttle as it passed over Australia. Blue jets occur much less frequently than sprites. By 2007, fewer than a hundred images had been obtained. The majority of these images, which include the first colour imagery, are associated with a single thunderstorm studied by researchers from the University of Alaska. These were taken in a series of 1994 aircraft flights to study sprites[8].

[edit]

Blue starters

Blue starters were discovered on video from a night time research flight around thunderstorms [9] and appear to be "an upward moving luminous phenomenon closely related to blue jets."[10] They appear to be shorter and brighter than blue jets, reaching altitudes of only up to 20 km.[11] "Blue starters appear to be blue jets that never quite make it," according to Dr. Victor P. Pasko, associate professor of electrical engineering.[12]

Elves

Elves often appear as a dim, flattened, expanding glow around 400 km (250 miles) in diameter that lasts for, typically, just one millisecond.[16] They occur in the ionosphere 100 km (60 miles) above the ground over thunderstorms. Their color was a puzzle for some time, but is now believed to be a red hue. Elves were first recorded on another shuttle mission, this time recorded off French Guiana on October 7, 1990.

Elves is a frivolous acronym for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations from Electromagnetic Pulse Sources.[17] This refers to the process by which the light is generated; the excitation of nitrogen molecules due to electron collisions (the electrons possibly having been energized by the electromagnetic pulse caused by a discharge from an underlying thunderstorm).

BTW some of these TLE's have been associated with otherwise unexplained aircraft accidents.

http://en.wikipedia....tning#Blue_jets

Blue jets differ from sprites in that they project from the top of the cumulonimbus above a thunderstorm, typically in a narrow cone, to the lowest levels of the ionosphere 25 miles (40 km) to 50 miles (80 km) above the earth.[64] They are also brighter than sprites and, as implied by their name, are blue in colour. They were first recorded on October 21, 1989, on a video taken from the space shuttle as it passed over Australia, and subsequently extensively documented in 1994 during aircraft research flights by the University of Alaska.[61][65]

On September 14, 2001, scientists at the Arecibo Observatory photographed a huge jet double the height of those previously observed, reaching around 50 miles (80 km) into the atmosphere. The jet was located above a thunderstorm over the ocean, and lasted under a second. Lightning was initially observed traveling up at around 50,000 m/s in a similar way to a typical blue jet, but then divided in two and sped at 250,000 m/s to the ionosphere, where they spread out in a bright burst of light.[66] On July 22, 2002, five gigantic jets between 60 and 70 km (35 to 45 miles) in length were observed over the South China Sea from Taiwan, reported in Nature.[65] The jets lasted under a second, with shapes likened by the researchers to giant trees and carrots.[citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia....rite_(lightning)#Related_aircraft_damage

Characteristics

Sprites have been observed over North America,[3] Central America, South America,[4] Europe, Southern Africa (Zaire), Australia, the Sea of Japan and Asia and are believed to occur during most large thunderstorm systems. Sprites are colored reddish-orange[2] in their upper regions, with bluish hanging tendrils below, and can be preceded by a reddish halo. They last longer than normal lower stratospheric discharges, which last typically a few milliseconds, and are triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between the thundercloud and the ground.[5] They often occur in clusters of two or more, and typically span the altitude range 50 kilometers (31 mi) to 90 kilometers (56 mi), with what appear to be tendrils hanging below, and branches reaching above.[2]

Optical imaging using a 10,000 frames per second high speed camera shows that sprites are actually clusters of small, decameter-sized (10–100 m, 30–300 ft) balls of ionization that are launched at an altitude of about 80 km and then move downward at speeds of up to ten percent the speed of light, followed a few milliseconds later by a separate set of upward moving balls of ionization.[6] Sprites may be horizontally displaced by up to 50 km from the location of the underlying lightning strike, with a time delay following the lightning that is typically a few milliseconds, but on rare occasions may be up to 100 milliseconds.

[edit]

Sprite halo

Sprites are sometimes preceded, by about 1 millisecond, by a sprite halo, a pancake-shaped region of weak, transient optical emissions approximately 50 kilometres (31 mi) across and 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) thick. The halo is centered at about 70 kilometres (43 mi) altitude above the initiating lightning strike.[7] These halos are thought to be produced by the same physical process that produces sprites, but for which the ionization is too weak to cross the threshold required for streamer formation. They are sometimes mistaken for elves, due to their visual similarity and short duration.[8][9]

Recent research carried out at the University of Houston in 2002 indicates that some normal (negative) lightning discharges produce a sprite halo, and that every lightning bolt between cloud and ground attempts to produce a sprite or a sprite halo.[10] Research in 2004 by scientists from Tohoku University found that very low frequency emissions occur at the same time as the sprite, indicating that a discharge within the cloud may generate the sprites.[11]

[edit]

Related aircraft damage

Sprites have erroneously been held responsible for otherwise unexplained accidents involving high altitude vehicular operations above thunderstorms. One example of this is the malfunction of a NASA stratospheric balloon launched on June 6, 1989 from Palestine, Texas. The balloon suffered an uncommanded payload release while flying at 120,000 feet (37,000 m) over a thunderstorm near Graham, Texas. Months after the accident, a post-flight investigation concluded[citation needed] that a "bolt of lightning" traveling upward from the clouds provoked the incident.[12] The attribution of the accident to a sprite was evidently made retroactively by several years, since this term was not coined until late 1993. Because of the comparatively low altitude of the balloon, whatever thunderstorm-related discharge may have been a causative factor in the accident, it was more likely to have been one of several other types of stratospheric discharges known to occur, such as blue jets, rather than the higher altitude sprites.

[ArtRosen]

It would take me days to understand what a Sprite is and what anti-matter is, but most of you seem fascinated by it, so... go antimatter!!

[Mallow]

Yeah... red sprites and blue jets...that was my first thought also. T

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_gamma-ray_flash

FWIW.

[A-L-E-X]

http://en.wikipedia....gamma-ray_flash

FWIW.

Wow, this is AWESOME! Thanks!

Did you see the part about conjugate events?

Conjugate Events

It's been suggested that TGFs may also accompany beams of highly relativistic particles which escape the atmosphere, propagate along magnetic field lines and precipitate on the opposite hemisphere. A few cases of TGFs, both on RHESSI and BATSE have shown unusual patterns that suggest this might be occurring, but these cases contradict the bulk of statistical evidence about TGF occurrences, so it is likely this type of TGF represents only a small number of them, if any.

[The_Global_Warmer]

So is there any way to harness the anti-matter?

[gravitylover]

So is there any way to harness the anti-matter?

[evil scientist voice] Heheh... Warp 6 Scotty. I want it NOW

[Brianonymous]

So is there any way to harness the anti-matter?

I would guess it would be in the same manner we utilize other nuclear reactions - heat... The biggest catch is storing antimatter. The second it touches a matter container, its nuke fuel. I suppose a clever magnetic arrangement might do the job... as long as it doesnt fail!

[A-L-E-X]

I would guess it would be in the same manner we utilize other nuclear reactions - heat... The biggest catch is storing antimatter. The second it touches a matter container, its nuke fuel. I suppose a clever magnetic arrangement might do the job... as long as it doesnt fail!

Great idea-- I think we will get there one day, although probably not in our lifetimes (but who knows.) You need some kind of strong EM field to be able to contain the antimatter and create a controlled "slow burn" kind of reaction (its going to be much more hazardous than nuclear at first, but when the technology is perfected, it will be MUCH cleaner..... ZERO waste products, 100 percent matter to energy conversion!)

[Rick G]

The key item here is it give us a way to create antimatter, once the storage problems are worked out. Right now it would take thousands of years to make an ounce of antimatter using the THC. I wounder how much power it would take to create enough antimatter for testing.