Antimatter

Over the coming decades there will be increasing discussion about sending robotic interstellar probes to nearby stars. The discovery and cataloging of inhabited planets within just a few light-years of Earth will provide the motivation -- we'll want to see ...  

Antimatter is so tantalizing a prospect for propulsion that every time a new slant on using it appears, I try to figure out its implications for long-haul missions. But the news, however interesting, is inevitably balanced by the reality of production problems. There’s no question that antimatter is potent stuff, with the potential for dealing [...]  

So it's ideally suited to Keane and Zhang's task. The new work produces some good news and some bad news. First the bad. The new simulations indicate that pions produced in this way will be significantly slower than previously thought, travelling at only ...  

In Stephen Baxter’s wonderful novel Ark (Roc, 2010), a team of scientists works desperately to come up with an interstellar spacecraft while epic floods threaten the Earth. The backdrop gives Baxter the chance to work through many of our current ideas about propulsion, from starships riding a wave of nuclear explosions (Orion) to antimatter possibilities [...]  

Matter annihilates antimatter, mostly resulting in light (no, not “pure energy”, whatever that is supposed to be). Matter and antimatter can also come into existence together via a process that is the reverse of annihilation. Yet our universe has almost no antimatter. How can such be if they come into existence in exactly equal amounts, each particle together with its antiparticle? Yes, well, they actually don’t, finished, good bye, but just...  

Can a single entity be matter and antimatter at the same time? It looks like it, say Michael Brooks and Richard Webb (full text available to subscribers)  

AntiMatter Games posts up new artwork · AntiMatter Games has artwork for a new Elementalist of Atalan up on their Facebook page. Here it is to see here, too. From them to you: Concept art for the Elementalist of Atalán.  

Using breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, an international collaboration has reported a landmark calculation of a subatomic particle decay important to understanding matter/antimatter asymmetry. The research helps nail down the exact process of kaon...  

Once when reading Boswell’s monumental life of the 18th Century writer and conversationalist Samuel Johnson, I commented to a friend how surprised I had been to discover that Johnson didn’t spend much time reading in his later years. “He didn’t need a lot of time,” replied my friend, a classics professor. “He tore the heart [...]  

Research spurs innovations in computing technology that drive advances to supercomputers UPTON, NY - An international collaboration of scientists has reported a landmark calculation of the decay process of a kaon into two pions, using breakthrough techniques on some of the world's fastest supercomputers. This is the same subatomic particle decay explored in a 1964 Nobel Prize-winning experiment performed at the U.S. Department of Energy's...  

UPTON, NY — An international collaboration of scientists has reported a landmark calculation of the decay process of a kaon into two pions, using breakthrough techniques on some of the world's fastest supercomputers. This is the same subatomic particle ...  

Analysis of figures spewing out of the Large Hadron Collider was compromised by a lack of storage space, said Peter Clarke, who works on the CERN LHCb experiment and is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. Crunching the ...  

Our galaxy produces 10 billion tonnes of antimatter every second. What could be pumping out so many positrons?  

New Scientist visits CERN's antimatter lab to find out why we should care about this slippery stuff  

A simulation of the Nobel-prizewinning decay of a kaon into two pions could help explain why the universe contains so much more matter than antimatter