WHY CONSIDER ANTIMATTER USE?

Energy release from matter--antimatter annihilation

Highest attainable(=2mc²)
Effective energy density ~ 44 kilotons/gram antimatter
Normal matter provides ½ energy release in annihilation
Concentrate on heavy, stable, charged particle (antiproton)
Antiproton/proton, antiproton/neutron annihilation => ~1.9 GeV energy release

Antimatter has special problems

Has to be manufactured
Manufacture is energy intensive
Needs to be stored without contacting material walls
Storage should be long term, light weight
Expensive product, but can make economic, systems sense to use

Physics, engineering interest

Unique phenomenologies
A great many physics, engineering areas impacted
Very high potential payoffs

No guarantee of ultimate success in large scale applications of antimatter
- But: near RDT&E paths to more confident assessment
- Near term RDT&E to guage probable success prudent, not very expensive

Use of annihilation energies is driven on the one hand by the very high energy density available in principle, and on the other hand by the special problems posed by antimatter.

It is easy and often customary to be dismissive a priori of annihilation energy utilization as too difficult or too remote, or both, to warrent serious consideration for any operational applications. A more prudent reaction is to realize that neither skeptics nor enthusiasts can today confidently support their asserted positions, and that as a consequence abjective assessment is needed and possible

In the USSR a reasonable, cautious, and balanced position on the problems and utilization of antimatter is taken, as the following quote from the most widely used undergraduate-level nuclear physics text indicates:

It may easily be shown that only 0.1-0.3% of the rest masses of the nuclei taking part in a reaction is liberated in the form of energy in fission or fusion. A natural question arises of whether a more efficient liberation of the rest energy Mc² is possible. To this end the nucleons must transmute into lighter particles--pions, leptons, photons. But the disintegration of nucleons is strictly prohibited by the baryonic charge conservation law.

However no conservation laws forbid the liberation of the rest energy of the nucleons in the process of annihilation of matter with antimatter consisting of antinucleons and positrons. Ths specific power yields in case of annihilation would exceed the yields of the existing power plants by two or three orders of magnitude. But antimatter does not exist in nature, at least in the region of the universe nearest to us. The production of antimatter is feasible in principle, but it will be very costly and will consume energy substantially exceeding the energy of annihilation. Therefore annihilation cannot be a large-scale source of energy. The use of annihilation power might be possible in the remote future for the propulsion of ultralongrange spacecraft.

Y.M. Shirokov and N.P. Yudin, "Nuclear Power," Nuclear Physics, Vol. 2, 1982, pp. 140-141