CERN Declare Antimatter Bombs Impossible

A graphic showing a collision at full power is pictured at the Compact Muon Solenoid experience control room of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Meyrin, outside Geneva, on March 30 of last year.

Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research have been experimenting with particles that may seem esoteric to the layman.

One of these mysterious particles being studied by the physicists at CERN is antimatter, the twin to matter particles that make up everything in the universe.

Antimatter particles are sub-atomic particles that have the opposite properties of those found in normal matter particles. An electron's antimatter equivalent is the positron.

Scientists have theorised that the universe had the same amount of matter and antimatter in the first moments after the Big Bang but over 14 billion years most of the antimatter was destroyed.

Scientists have never been able to explain why the antimatter disappeared but one theory points out that there could have been more matter than antimatter in the beginning.

Matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they meet so if there were more matter than antimatter, there would have been enough normal matter to form the stars.

Ever since the scientists at CERN reported that they were successful in creating antimatter using the Large Hadron Collider there have been some concerns among the general public about the implications of the discovery.

Could antimatter be used to make bombs as popularised in Dan Brown's book "Angels and Demons" where a secret society used an antimatter bomb?

To allay those fears CERN actually released a disclaimer on its site about antimatter and the possibility of an antimatter bomb.

"It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as 'typical' hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already," the group responsible for creating the antimatter explained at their website.

There is also not enough antimatter created by CERN to annihilate the Earth or even use for anything other than for pure research. Creating enough antimatter to build a bomb is also very inefficient since CERN can only create miniscule amounts of antimatter by colliding particles at very high energies.

"Thanks to the inefficiency of the transformation process of energy into antimatter we are safe," CERN physicist Rolf Landua explained on the institute's website. "We do not have to worry about military applications."

"Take Dan Brown's hypothetical 1 gram of antimatter," he continued. "With present CERN technology, we would be able to produce about 10 nanograms of antimatter per year, at a cost of about $10-20 million.

Then we would have to deal with the problem of how to store so many particles (about 10,000,000,000,000,000 antiprotons).

Obviously, it would take 100 million years - and $1,000 trillion - to make 1 gram. This appears ambitious even for the US military."