Another possibility. You generally convert a subcritical mass of fissionable material into a critical mass by compressing it. There are practical limits on how much you can do this. Some of those probably have to do with how “good” your explosives are. This means there is lower limit of how small you can make your subcritical mass. It may be possible that if you use antimatter to power your compression scheme you might be able to get by with a much smaller subcritical mass.
Could the same principle therefore apply to fusion?
Bump’s last link certainly indicates something to that effect (I posted my post before I read his link)
They use a little bit of antimatter to fission a good bit greater (but still tiny amount) amount of fissile material which releases a bunch of energy to cause an even larger fusion reaction. Pretty clever. Also interesting to note that they say to power an interplanetary vessel you “only” need the amount of antimatter we produce in a year. So, its not like for a purpose like theirs you need an absurd amount of it to do something useful.
That particular page is some student’s project for a class, but I followed up on the keywords. Indeed, the idea doesn’t use (the nonexistent) neutrons from the annihilation. It uses an antiproton beam to break up nuclei within a fissionable mass, resulting in gamma rays and nuclear debris (including neutrons) that can induce fission and, through any resulting ejecta, propulsion. The idea is on the good side of crackpot, but it isn’t feasible at all today. It looks like a handful of people are toying with the idea.
If you mean antimatter annihilating with matter (which is what I think you mean), then binding energy may or may not be relevant. Neither an electron nor a positron, for example, have any binding energy. They are fundamental particles. If they annihilate (at rest), you will have 1.64x10[sup]-13[/sup] joules of energy released in the form of gamma rays. That energy came from the mass of the electron and the position. For protons and antiprotons, though, much of their rest mass comes from their composite nature (i.e., binding energy).
Why would you want to build an antimatter bomb? Are you really that interested in killing other people in such great numbers that you would take a potentially beautiful new type of energy and just use it to make bombs? Are you insane? How is it that you are allowed on the internet? I see that apparently this website has gone from fighting ignorance to promoting it. Or at least allowing special cases of ignorance to post ridiculous suggestions such as building antimatter bombs. Are nuclear weapons not horrifying enough for you? How about instead of using it to kill we figure out a way to harness that energy and power vehicles and homes and create lives for those less fortunate? I don’t know. I just feel like “because we can” is a really shitty idea to give people in power. Especially when you are talking about a weapon of that magnitude.
I guess you’re not yet familiar with it, so let me introduce you to the human specie..
You do realize that almost all the physics research underpinning modern nuclear power derived from nuclear weapons research, aren’t you?
Is there any reason to believe that the same thing wouldn’t occur in this case? Large scale military programs and technologies have a long history of having commercial applications that end up living longer and having higher impact than the military programs that launched them. Things as high tech as computers and Boeing airliners and things as mundane as bulldozer tracks are examples of this.
But - and I am only saying this because I care - there are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market today that are just as tasty as the real thing.
Stranger
As a coffee addict, that’s a funny line, but in no way close to the truth. (Seems to be appropriate in his case, though.) I wouldn’t mind a decaf bean that didn’t taste like shit. Great movie. Weird how Val Kilmer (maybe David Atherton) was the only guy whose career went anywhere after that movie.
Relating to the “gravity bomb” thread, and bump’s point, I wouldn’t mind seeing a military space race, if only because that’s seems to be the only way the necessary R&D money will be spent to develop new types of rocket propulsion, methods for manipulating large masses, and methods for constructing large space structures. All of which are things I wouldn’t mind seeing.
And maybe blow threatening asteroids to small enough pieces to be harmless?
I think the point I had the other night is that the governments of the world are always looking for new ways to control the populations of the Earth. What better way than to build a new type of bomb? Of course I want to see antimatter(the coolest god damned thing ever discovered) used for a good purpose. Blowing up incoming asteroids is a wonderful idea. Moving large masses into orbit would be another great accomplishment of humankind. But the fact is that when the different countries around the would already have nuclear weapons pointed at each other, whats to stop them from using antimatter weapons against each other.
It’s not that its not a good idea. It’s just that I truly believe that humans aren’t ready to be harnessing the destructive force of antimatter, fusion, fission, or any other type of nuclear energy. Splitting the atom could have been something so amazing and wonderful that there may be hardly any suffering in the world. But instead we stayed with gasoline powered everything and used the new type of energy we discovered to kill people. Twice.
So yes. There are wonderful things that could be done with antimatter. It could potentially power the world. It could protect us from incoming galactic garbage. It is an amazing opportunity. But humanity’s first and foremost goal it seems is to attempt to kill itself.
Just don’t say antimatter bombs. The governments of the world have enough terrifying ideas without that one. Here’s a list off the top of my head:
VX gas
mustard gas
sarin gas (spelling?)
the hydrogen bomb
the atomic bomb
ICBM’s with nuclear warheads
suitcase bombs
biological bombs
Napalm
And my personal favorite monstrosity… Cyanide bombs
I don’t think they need any help.
How in the world can you do anything with antimatter without weaponizing it? This isn’t like atomic bombs where you need sophisticated precise engineering to make it go off. All you need to do to make antimatter explode is turn off the containment. If you’ve made enough of it to do anything practical, you’ve made a weapon.
You really don’t think that we can find another use for it? That much energy release from such small particles? There MUST be a way to contain it and control it. We just don’t know what it is yet. We aren’t that far along.
I am FOR making it for a use like one user said to blow up incoming asteroids. I agree with that. I am skeptical, and honestly, downright scared to death about making it specifically to make bombs out of it. If that is it’s only use, then they need to stop making it immediately.
Welcome to Earth. We blow each other up almost every day here.
We can find plenty of other uses for it, a fact I acknowledged in that post. But all of them involve making horrible weapons in the process. We can choose not to use it as a weapon, but if it exists in meaningful quantities, a weapon it inevitably is.
I think the point that everyone is missing is: Antimatter makes a lousy bomb!
The reason that an A-bomb works so well is that the reaction occurs so fast. In a matter-antimatter bomb, it’s going to be difficult (probably impossible) to react much of the components before the matter surrounding the anti-matter gets used up. Eventually, all of the anti-matter will get turned into energy, but it’s going to take much longer than a nuclear explosion. More like burning than exploding. So, there are going to be a lot of gamma-rays emitted, which will kill anything nearby, but I’m not sure how destructive it would be to structures.
Hey! The Ultimate Neutron Bomb!
Turning off the containment is always a bad idea 
As you said, it will most likely only destroy as much true matter as it can come into contact with. Once it’s used up, I rather doubt that any more mass scale destruction would go on. But the gamma ray photons could also be the part that creates a power source. All that needs to be done is figure out a way to shield them from doing harm to organic species, while STILL being able to harness is. Perhaps if the photons could be passed through a conductive metal, thus harnessing the Photoelectric Effect. If the energy produced by such a thing is only negligible, then maybe we are just pissing in the wind with antimatter. (Ha! Didn’t mean for that sentence to be hilarious but it kind of is…)
I feel like there is an energy alternative to be explored here.
Ha! Ghostbusters. Awesome.
While I will defer to your expertice in physics on almost any point, in this matter I must object. No, not just as good. Perhaps acceptable to you, or even to most consumers, but not just as good.
Tris
The last thing you want to do is “blow up” an impacting asteroid (referred to in literature as a Potentially Hazardous Object or PHO), as the debris field poses an even broader and less trackable hazard, and if large enough to pose a serious hazard intact will pose a nearly equal hazard to the energy delivered to the atmosphere. You would rather push it “gently” to the side, into a trackable orbit that will not intercept the Earth for the foreseeable future. In [POST=12773678]this old thread[/POST] i present a method of doing so that doesn’t require any science fictional gravity tractor technology; basically, you use an cloud of vaporized material to provide momentum from a nuclear device to impart a moderated impulse. With the use of multiple devices, even a very large (~ 1 km diameter) PHO could be feasibly redirected.
As for the weaponable potential for antimatter, Chronos is correct. Antimatter can, by its very nature, be readily used as a weapon. You can even destroy otherwise invulnerable single reinforced macromolecule spaceship hulls with a sufficient amount of it. As an energy source, unless you find a naturally occurring quantity of it, it doesn’t make much sense, as you have to produce as least as much energy to produce it as you will get from it.
I’m sorry. It’s just that I didn’t want you guys to think I was stuffy. You know, no fun. All brain, no penis.
Stranger