Homemade Spinthariscope

Recently I was lucky to stumble across a local online store which sells ion chamber module for homemade smoke alarm projects. Without much hesitation I bought two of these chambers knowing they contain tiny amount of radioactive materials.

Yes, you heard right. I was looking for an ionizing radiation source for some of my hobby experiments and Americium is the only radioactive man-made element (of the periodic table) entered the common household as ionization source inside smoke detector alarms.

Now, I am not going to elaborate how ionization chamber works inside smoke alarms because it will digress from our current topic. What I was interested was extracting the ionizing source inside the chamber; and so I did.

The source was Americium-241 (the small embedded golden disc at the top of the plastic Petri dish), with major part of the radiation being alpha particles spitting out of the yellow metal (trivial part in gamma emission) with average energy of 4.5 million electron volts (MeV), factory spectroscopic evaluation full wave half maximum at 0.7 MeV. Because Americium-241 has a relatively short half-life of 432.6 years, each source contains less than 0.5 micrograms of americium dioxide has an activity of 0.8 microcuries which is equivalent to about 30,000 nuclear disintegration per second.

See, radioactive decay is a relatively energetic process. Literally chunks of matter in the form of alpha particles are being tossed out into the air from each decaying Americium atom (remember about 30,000 atoms are decaying at any moment) inside the golden alloy. After so, the fragmented Americium atom will become a Neptunium atom (also radioactive) which subsequently decay into other more stable elements. As a matter of fact, a 15 year old Americium source will contain about 5 percent Neptunium-237, which has a half-life of 2.14 million years.

Can we see this flying-in-the-air nuclear chunk? No. Even if we take this radioactive source and put it next to our eyes, we cannot see anything. No green glowing stuffs like we so often see in science fictions and cartoons. Radioactivity is invisible to our naked eyes but fortunately we have some other ways to make these energetic flying particles appear.

When alpha particle travel in air at great speed, in this case about 15,000 kilometres per second (based on 4.5 MeV relativistic kinetic energy) it has high probability to collide with anything that comes in their way due to its relative huge size. Usually these particles doesn't travel far, about 4 centimetres at most in air and will lose their energy in scattering events. It is like smashing a cue ball into a pool table full of billiard balls - eventually the cue ball will stop as it deposits its kinetic energy into the surrounding ball during collisions.

When collided in just the right way with the right materials, the passage of an alpha particle can be "seen". This is done with a process physicist call "scintillation". A transparent material such as phosphor powder (the stuff you get from old TV screens) will emit flashes of light when it is being collided by energetic moving particles.

TV phosphor powder in plastic container

More than two years ago, a friend of mine gave me an old TV which I have dismantled to get its high voltage components. I also collected some phosphor materials by scraping off the powder inside the glass TV screen. I had to gently break the glass by covering the entire TV tube with a damp cloth to avoid vacuum implosion, a hit with a hammer near to the electron gun will crack the glass allowing air to enter the tube.

From a glance, it seems the grain size of the powder is quite coarse, and indeed they were flaked off from the glass surface. Among the materials that was scraped out, it is a mixture of three types of phosphor and there is no way to isolate them. The three types of powder corresponds to red, green and blue light emitted if energetic particles such as electrons collide on it. More specifically, typical TV phosphor components are denoted P22R, component: Y2O2S:Eu+Fe2O3 glows red at 611nm, P22G, component: ZnS:Cu,Al glows green at 530nm and P22B, component: ZnS:Ag glows blue at 450nm.

Using a cellophane tape, I stick some some phosphor material from the container making sure only the finest powder was glued on the tape, then the phosphor coated tape was mounted on a washer providing a hole for the alpha particles to strike from the bottom (refer to first photo on top, lower part of the Petri dish).

What I am making is essentially a spinthariscope, an early device to visualize radioactivity. It has only three components. A radioactive source (my Americium-241 alpha emitter), a phosphor screen for the alpha particles to scintillate on and lastly a magnifying glass powerful enough to collect the faint light coming out from the cellophane tape. Here's the schematic:

Before looking at the cellophane tape with a magnifying glass (binocular eyepiece), I had to test and see if the tape was scintillating. So I hooked up my DSLR, turned off the lights in my room, putting sensor sensitivity to the maximum and gave it a 25 second exposure, and amazing result shows:

The blue spot was a collective exposure of individual flashes happening on the phosphor coated tape. Of course, without a magnifying glass we cannot see those tiny individual flashes but as a whole, the blue spot corresponds to the surface of phosphor powder where it was radially exposed to an Americium alpha source directly below it. I was pretty excited to see the individual scintillations, and I was lucky yet again that my father have an old Russian binocular for me to disassemble.

The eyepiece of the binocular has short focal length and it is a compound lens which behaves like a convex high-power magnifying glass. This is ideal to be part of the spinthariscope component as the lens should be placed as close to the screen as possible to avoid losses of light and act as a "light gatherer".

So I cap on the lens and look through it. Nothing. I did not see anything at first but it was no surprise, because each scintillation only result in emission of a few light particles (i.e. photons) and therefore the light should be very faint. But when our eyes adapted to the dark, it has higher capability to detect those faint flashes of light and will usually take about 15 to 20 minutes to reach that kind of sensitivity in darkness.

I found a video in YouTube features what we are able to see through a spinthariscope. Please be noted that the video uses a movable alpha source, therefore the centre of the activity seems to move around the field-of-view.

It sparkled with beautiful flashes of light, where each spot represent one alpha particle striking through the phosphor powder on the cellophane tape. I here provide a simplified schematic of the mechanism:

The active area of the spinthariscope is this: radioisotope Americium-241 emits alpha particles travelling in straight line towards the phosphor coated tape. When an alpha particle collide with the phosphor materials, each atomic collision provides one photon (one quanta of light) and it is extremely faint. But I once read that human eyes are sensitive to even 6 photons per rod photoreceptor cell, (scientific citation here) I suppose each flash should compose of more than that amount of photons coming from each alpha particles, which implies it is a multiple collision event happening to one alpha particle. 

Enchanting views aside, light from scintillations in my spinthariscope is rather weak and it takes time for our eyes to adapt darkness for observation. Leslie Wright managed to use a photointensifier tube, something you can get from night-vision goggles to multiply the photons coming out from the scintillations and it was bright enough to be recorded with a compact camera.  

The next stop is for me is to take a controlled long exposure photograph in varying distance between the alpha source and the phosphored tape. Perhaps I am able to visualize the inverse-square law and do some elementary calculation based on brightness to validate it. 

Cosmic Rays: Interactions of Particles with Earth's Atmosphere

The count rate of particles vs. the altitude of earth’s atmosphere (hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu, 2010)

When a primary cosmic ray particle enters earth atmosphere, it will encounter many atoms and collisions will occur. This collisions will send a shower of “secondary” particles which are also subatomic particles such as pions which will quickly decay into relatively stable muons, neutrinos and gamma rays. Muons will soon too decay into electron and positrons which they both will annihilate and the gamma rays will interact with atmospheric atoms.

The numbers of particle that finally reached the earth’s surface depends on the energy content of the "primary" cosmic ray particle. Most secondary cosmic rays that reached the surface of earth are muons with an average intensity of 100 counts per metre square per second.

Although thousands of cosmic ray particles pass through our body every minute, the resulting exposure to that amount of radiation is minimal, safe, and is considered as background. We can say that we are irradiated with fast particles every single moment in our lifetime with negligible health effects.

Cosmic Rays: High Energy Particles

A collision between a high-energy cosmic ray particle and an atom in a photographic emulsion as viewed through the microscope. (Dr. David P. Stern, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, January 2005)

The energy of cosmic ray particles are measured in electron volts and the first measurement of a cosmic ray particle that has energy exceeding 1e8 TeV is observed at the Volcano Ranch experiment in New Mexico, 1962.

Since then cosmic rays of even higher energy has been observed and the highest so far observed is on the evening of 15th October 1991 at Dugway Proving Grounds using the Fly’s Eye Cosmic Ray Detector which the particle has an energy of 3e8 TeV (50 joules) which is equivalent to the kinetic energy of a 142 g baseball travelling at 96 km/h.

The energy of this particle is 50 million times more than any particle accelerators on earth can produce and the effective energy of collision of this particle would be 750 TeV which is about 50 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider operated by CERN in Geneva.

The sources of such highly energetic particles were a mystery and the discovery was a shock to astrophysicist. There were theories suggesting these particles could have originated from the active galactic core where they come from super-massive black holes.

Cosmic Rays: Origins

Principally, there are two types of cosmic rays – primary and secondary. For the primary cosmic rays, these cosmic particles come from extrasolar astrophysical sources such as supernova explosions and black holes. The primary cosmic ray particles can then travel through space, colliding with the interstellar matter to produce the secondary cosmic rays. The sun also produces relatively low energetic particles from the stellar nucleosynthesis that is related to the so-called “solar wind”.

Because cosmic ray particles are charged, as they pass through any object with magnetic field including earth’s magnetic field, their trajectory is bent and hence randomizing their path, making it impossible to determine the particle’s origin.

Studies of high-energy gamma rays (between 10MeV to 1000MeV) emitted when a cosmic ray collide with interstellar gas atoms indicated that most of the cosmic ray particles are confined at the rim of the galaxy, probably due to the galactic magnetic field. The collision between cosmic rays with light elements also produces nuclear fragments of radioactive isotopes such as Beryllium-10 which possess a half-life of 1.6 million years. By measuring the composition percentage of Beryllium-10 in cosmic rays shows that on average, cosmic ray particles spends about 10 million years in the outer ring of the galaxy before going into intergalactic space.

Cosmic Rays: Composition

Solar System and Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) composition (NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, Feb 2010)

By definition from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), cosmic rays are highly energetic charged particles that are travelling near to the speed of light that is coming to earth from space in all directions. The general composition of cosmic ray is mostly hydrogen nuclei (the lightest and most abundant element in the universe) which are essentially protons, but cosmic rays can also include electrons, positrons and other subatomic particles, in addition, nuclei of other heavier elements in the periodic table are also detected. The proportions are 89% of the particles being the hydrogen nucleus (proton), 10% helium and 1% other elements.

The common heavier elements present in the cosmic rays such as (silicon, carbon, oxygen, iron and magnesium) are in a proportion to the abundance of such elements in the solar system, but there are important differences in the proportion of element and its isotopes that that gives information of the origin and history of cosmic rays of galactic origin.

Electrons constitute about 1% of the galactic cosmic rays and the reason why accelerating electrons are less efficient than light nuclei is still an unsolved mystery.

In the graph above, silicon is taken as the standard (reference point) and comparing to the relative abundances of other elements in the solar system and in galactic cosmic rays. Silicon is used as a reference because of its common intermediate-weight that is relatively easy to measure.

Cosmic Rays: A Little Energetic History

Today, most people who know about the existence of cosmic rays take it for granted that the earth is constantly being bombarded by particles coming from outer space since all of existence and the time to come. This is a story of the discovery of cosmic rays and human’s knowledge about it.

The journey starts from the “father” of cosmic rays studies, Victor Hess. He was a graduate in physics and during his work as an assistant in the institute of Radium research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in the early 1900’s, he was astounded by the fact that there are residue charges trapped inside a sealed electroscopes no matter how good is the quality of the instrument. Scientist of his day proposed that it was caused by terrestrial ionising radiation – radioactivity from rock minerals. Hence the ionisation measured by the electroscopes should reduce if brought up higher into the atmosphere.

Oddly, previous experiments seems to indicate that the ionisation level is actually increasing with altitude, for example in 1910, Theodore Wulf measured the ionisation levels at the bottom and on top of Eiffel tower in Paris and it is found that the ionising radiation levels detected at higher level is much higher compared to the ground which is contradicting to the proposed terrestrial ionising radiation theory. Many other scientists at that time tried other methods to send instruments to record the ionisation levels in higher altitude using balloons but the data retrieved are inconclusive due to instrument defects under the conditions of high altitude.

Now speculating that the radiation is actually coming from the sky instead of the ground, Hess improvised the experiment by designing instruments that can withstand the pressure and temperature conditions of high altitude. He also determined that terrestrial radiation will no longer produce ionisation effect in altitudes higher than 500 meters.

Hess then mounts his instrument on balloons and sent to the skies ten times in the course of three years during (1911-1913). He found that at the height of several kilometres into the sky, the ionisation level is a few times higher than the surface of earth. Hence he concluded that “a radiation of very high penetrating power enters our atmosphere from above.”

Another conclusive data comes from one of Hess’s experiment on 12 April 1912, during a near-total eclipse of the sun. The ionising level did not reduce under the eclipse means that the radiation could not be from the sun itself; it has to come from further out in space. Hess’s experiments are later confirmed by Robert Milikan in 1925 who coined the term “cosmic rays”. And for this discovery, Hess shared the Nobel Prize in physics with the discoverer of the Positron, Carl D. Anderson in 1936.

For a period of time, cosmic rays are referred to as rays because it was believed to be a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but during the 1930’s it was discovered that the cosmic rays must be composed of charged particles because they are affected by earth’s magnetic field.

My Essay Part (XIII) - Supernova

Supernova SN-1987a when a star exploded in a dwarf galaxy (Large Magellanic Cloud) next to our milky way galaxy. This event has been fortunate for the last supernova happened about 300 years ago. In year 1987, physicist and astronomers has the technological capabilities to examine his explosion in tight scrutiny. Separate neutrino detectors on earth detected a burst of neutrino particles on that day which is consistent with the theory where 99% of supernova energy is radiated away in the form of neutrino.

When the star was younger the energy generated will push the gas apart from collapsing due to gravity. Now that the star has run out of fuel, essentially there is no more energy to hold on and gravitation takes place, the core of the star is literally crushed. During this process, within seconds, the collapse and the rapid rise of temperature due to it will trigger a tremendous explosion: a supernova. Temperature will reach unprecedented heights again and the process makes the star a billion fold brighter, visible throughout the galaxy. Now, with an explosion of such grandeur scale, elements heavier than iron can start to form, making all the elements in the periodic table possible, uranium included.

When all the guts of the star scattered into the stellar neighbourhood, it became a seed for a second generation of stars. Elements that are heavier than hydrogen: Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Helium became abundant. Sounds familiar? These are the ingredients of life, DNA, as we know it. Our sun when viewed with special instruments revealed itself to contain about 2 percent of heavier elements because our sun is a second or third generation star.

Our solar system is therefore built from the ingredients left from the ash of a previous brilliant gem in the cosmos. Heavier elements stick together due gravity to form planets with solid surface – and that is where our picture comes in.

My Essay Part (XII) - Stellar Nucleosynthesis

Graph of Binding energy per particle in an atomic nucleus versus the atomic mass number: note that before Fe-56 (Iron), lighter elements fuse together to release energy. After Iron, matter will release energy if they undergo fission. (like nuclear reactors)

This nuclear reaction will stay for quite a while as long the star has hydrogen fuel to burn. Now, this is truly an action of balance. The hydrogen will be fused together into heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, neon, and since the heavier elements are denser, they will be drawn into the core of the star faster than other elements.

Very soon, the star will have no more hydrogen fuel to do the nuclear fusion now the star seeks for an alternative fuel, the heavier elements. So, the star now started to fuse oxygen, lithium, and all the other elements in the familiar periodic table in your chemistry class into even heavier elements, now the star begin to feel heavy, literally. The core of the star contains more and more heavy elements up to iron.

Iron is the last heavy element, sort of like a nuclear waste for a fusion reaction because fusing two iron nuclei together will absorb energy rather than releasing it. Since a star is an energy factory therefore, a star is at the death row when it sees itself staring at a core of iron at its centre because it has nothing else to fuse and generate energy.

My Essay Part (XI) - First Generation Stars

Photo from NASA Hubble: Ultra Deep Field - a photograph of the infant universe when galaxies are forming from clouds of gas, each speck of light is an entire galaxy of it's own, each galaxy contain millions of stars.

What we had gone through so far is the physical process of how the universe was born with all the constituents of matter is created. Now, with the majority of atoms floating around in the universe being the lightest hydrogen atom, the universe is ready to make its first batch of shining stars. Because there is a slight asymmetry in the distribution of matter in the early universe, as imprinted in the cosmic microwave backgrounds, the part of the universe that contains more matter particles begin to condense, matter starts sticking closer to each other, forming a region that is rich in atomic nuclei.

Slowly, with the help of gravity, atom by atom, the cloud of particles get closer to each other and start to pick up a spin. As the attraction region get smaller, the spin gets faster and the region became denser with atoms and eventually, it would be spinning fast enough to counter the attraction of gravity and this is how the rotating galaxies like our Milky Way was born. Other collection of atoms that clumps together but did not pick up a spinning motion will become oval-shaped elliptical galaxies.

As time went on, inside the galaxy, the cloud of atoms (also called gas) of hydrogen and helium started to break into smaller pockets of clouds, and these smaller parts of gas will also evolve just like the formation of galaxy, rotating itself forming a ball of gas. As the ball get smaller due to the attraction of gravity, more atoms of hydrogen and helium knock into each other heating up the gas, and eventually the temperature of the gas will get hot enough for the hydrogen atoms to fuse together, forming heavier elements and by doing this process, releasing a lot of energy in the form of heat and light. The first stars are hence born.

My Essay Part (X) - Cosmic Microwave Background

The Cosmic Microwave Background as detected by WMAP satellite: The red region is where matter is dense and the blue region is the voids.

But not for another 380000 years does much to our soup of atomic nuclei because the universe is still hot enough for the electrons to stay away from the nucleus flying freely with the photons. Until the temperature of the universe dropped to about 3000 degrees Kelvin, the electrons start to combine with the nucleus forming the first stable atoms and this process will release visible light photons that bath our universe. As the space-time continue to expand, the photons slowly lose its energy and changes its frequency from visible light towards infrared and now microwaves.

When astrophysicist now look into every part of the night time sky with microwave detectors, they find an unmistakable fingerprint of 2.73 degree Kelvin microwave photons whose patterns in the sky retains the memory of the distribution of matter just after atoms were formed.

My Essay Part (IX) - Formation of Atomic Hydrogen

Light emitted from Hydrogen discharge tube - When a Hydrogen atom is excited by an external energy, the electrons will "jump" to a higher energy state and when the electron start to lose energy, it drops back to a lower energy state by releasing it's energy in the form of light.

Now, the universe is relatively cool enough not to cook up new quarks, so the remaining quarks quickly fused together to form a class of heavier particles called hadrons. Hadrons are heavier particles and they are the particles we find in every nucleus of an atom that made up all visible, normal matter. Protons and neutrons are members of the hadron family. At this time, though the universe is relatively cool but it still have the energy to spontaneously generate anti-hadrons and it will continue to annihilate with the hadrons until the universe is cool enough not to produce hadron and anti-hadron pairs. The asymmetry is still at work and the hadrons that survived the annihilation ultimately get to see the universe as they will form stars and planets and eventually us.

If the universe did not start out with the asymmetry the universe will have no particles left to survive because all would have been annihilated to produce photons.

By now, it has been one second after the Big Bang.

The size of the universe is now a few light years across, that is approximately the distance between our sun and its closest few stars. At a billion degrees, it is still hot enough to spontaneously produce electrons and anti-electrons. But, as the universe continues to expand and cool, eventually this process stops and again, there is an asymmetry between the electron and the positrons (anti-electrons) which cause some electrons to remain.

So, now we have protons, neutrons and electrons which are the primary ingredients to form any element of nature in the periodic table. As the universe continue to cool to about 100 million degrees, protons and neutrons start to stick together manufacturing the first atomic nuclei and born the universe which 90% composed of hydrogen and 10% of helium along with trace amounts of deuterium, tritium and lithium.

Two minutes has passed since the beginning.

My Essay (Part VIII) - Baryon Asymmetry

The Yin-Yang symbol - symmetry requires an eye to see.

During the first trillionth of a second, when the strong force is departing from the unified forces, matter and energy played a spectacular show. True elementary particles, the constituents of every matter in the universe, spawned out of existence thanks to Einstein’s famous E=mc2. At that time, the universe is flooded with particles called quarks and leptons (Electron is an example of lepton) and also their antimatter counterpart. Bosons are present too to account for the particles interaction. In this quark-lepton era, the universe is still so dense that the distance between quarks that are fused together and those who are not are almost undistinguishable.

* * *

Here is one of the interesting parts of the cosmic evolution: For every bits of matter created in the first sliver of time, an antimatter (sort of like a counterpart of matter) is created too. Antimatter behaves exactly like a matter particle except it has different charge. For example, electron is matter particle; the antimatter counter part of electron is a positron. As the name suggest, the positron has exactly the same properties of electron but it carries an opposite charge. An electron is negatively charged and a positron is well, positively charged. If both electron and positron meet, they will collide and vanish in existence and create a pair of photons which are particles of light with the energy content exactly the same as the electron and positron combined. A process physicist called annihilation.

The magic of creation is that somewhere during the forces split; there exist an asymmetry of the particle pairs created. For every billion anti-quarks created, there is a billion and one quark. But that small difference is hardly noticeable amongst the continuous creation, annihilation and re-creation of fundamental particles of nature because the energy involved at the early universe is still highly intense. But eventually, the extra one quark (and other un-annihilated particles) managed to survive as the universe now continues to expand and cool. The universe is now the size of our solar system with temperature about a trillion degrees. It has been a millionth of second since the beginning of time.

The science behind 2012

There are no other apocalyptic movie that is more epic than 2012. All the scenes are so meticulously done by computer software that gives the viewer nothing else but the sense of awe - on how things breaks.

In the movie, we see buildings crashing down with people hanging on their dear lives on it. We see volcano explode, huge tidal waves, blasting, ripping and quenching the continent into smitherines. All these exaggerated actions, according to the movie, start from the simple alignment of celestial bodies (planets) somehow causing the sun to produce stronger solar flares and release matter interacting particles called neutrinos that boils the innards of our planet.


I think there is A LOT to say about the physics and the mechanisms behind this movie.


First of all, I do not think the world is going to end in 2012 simply because of the planetary alignments. Once, I was watching this X-file episode, it was a story about the planets align in a cross and earth is in the centre of the cross. Who ever that's born on that day will possess the powers of the cosmos because the planets "aligned" the power on you.

Think again. Our perception of the cross is all human's story. We have a history and a book that describes the cross as a holy thing thus we see planets align together as something big. But the fact is, whatever the planetary formation is, it will not do anything to anyone on earth. It's all just in our mind - anthropic.

The planets will move in their respective orbits according to the laws of nature and every now and then the planets can form any shape.

You want triangle? or square? or cross? or simply a straight line? You get those every once in a while. Because planets move in their orbits in different speed due to their mass and distance from the sun.


Second.

I think the movie went too over explaining why the earth is behaving badly and stuff. In essence, I don't think it's necessary to introduce science into the plot. It misleads people if it is done wrongly.

In the movie, Satnam (the Indian scientist) explains to Adrian that the sun is releasing a type of particles called neutrinos that interacts with anything causing water in the neutrino detector to boil hence the earth behaving badly.

I remember myself saying "impossible" in the movie before Adrian says so. My friend Alex just stared at me.. =(

Neutrinos do NOT interact with matter. At least not in THAT manner. Because they are electrically neutral (carry no charge) , they are almost massless, travels almost at the speed of light and they are able to pass through ordinary matter almost undisturbed and are thus extremely difficult to detect.

In fact, for every single second, there are 50 trillions (50,000,000,000,000) neutrinos passing through us and we won't even feel it!

*I'll explain more about these ghostly particles later if it did not fry peoples brain now.*



Anyway, here's another logic block.


If the neutrinos in the movie interacts with the water and cause it to boil and cause the earth to experience such effects.................

Shouldn't the cast (the people) in that movie be boiled to their death by their own blood?

Antimatter IV

A BIG problem in physics.

With that, another question popped out in physics. And so far, no one can fully explain why is it so.

The million dollar question is:

Why is there SO MUCH matter in this universe compared to antimatter? (a.k.a Baryon Asymmetry Problem)

At the beginning of time which is the Big Bang – the beginning of this universe, everything was SO HOT back then, matter and antimatter is always spontaneously generated from pure energy.

The amount of matter and antimatter at that time should be the same. But somehow, physicist believe that there’s a slight difference in the amount that cause the imbalance. Like, for every billion antielectron, there’s a billion AND ONE electron. Both collide and left that ONE electron that survived the titanic explosion.

And we, are the leftovers.

Andromeda Galaxy. Closest major galaxy to our Milky Way.

Thank God for that.

We ARE using antimatter in hospital now.

As absurd as it sound, it is in fact, the truth. Ever heard of PET scan? It stands for Positron Emission Tomography.

Real life application - non invasive scanning technology

It is used to scan your body without any incisions involved. You’re given a radioactive sugar, you drink it. The brain consume sugar and the sugar will spontaneously release positrons INSIDE your brain. The positron will immediately encounter an electron and annihilated, generating gamma rays that can be detected outside the body.

And it will reveal clear photos of brain activity in real time!

The working brain. (Red marks the activity in that brain.)

So, the bottom line for this whole story – while antimatter is unlocking the secrets of the human brain, human brain, has yet to unlock antimatter’s secret. We’re close.

Angels and Demons : Antimatter (Part III)

Making antimatter.

As simple as it sounds, making antimatter is NOTHING close to simple...

First, you need to make anti-protons. Then you need to make positrons, and bind them together - one single atom at a time.

With today’s technology, making a teaspoon of antimatter will bankrupt ANY nation. So, in the book, it’s not possible for the LHC to produce amount that is visible to the naked eye.

Consider this, making ONE gram of antimatter will cost 100 QUADRILLION dollars and the atom smasher need to operate for 100 BILLION years! [Physics of the Impossible – MK]

The Tevatron (Fermi lab), particle collider in Chicago. USA. The largest particle collider before the LHC.

Finding them in nature.

So, one might just say, “hey, if it’s so hard to make antimatter on earth, why don’t we look for it in the universe?”

Again, not as easy as it seems.

Suppose there’s a star that is made of entirely antimatter somewhere in this galaxy we stay, the star’s surface must be a VERY happening place as explosions happens ALL the time! Loads of gamma rays will be emitted and we can detect it with our detectors with ease.

So far, we have scanned the universe in gamma ray spectrum we see no signs of that.

Angels and Demons : Antimatter (Part II)

Antielements, antichemistry...

Well, since every particle has its antimatter counterpart, therefore one can think about making anti hydrogen which is simply an atom comprised of a positron circulating an antiproton. And minute quantities HAS been produced in atom smasher labs. The first was in CERN.

The Hydrogen and the Anti-Hydrogen

Theoretically, making antielements from antiprotons, antielectrons and antineutrons is by all means possible.

In fact, anti-chemistry, anti-human, anti-galaxy or even anti-universe can exist.

So next time, if you see aliens descending in front of your lawn, throw a ball to he/she/it first. If that thing didn’t explode, you can take it to your leader safely.



Keeping antimatter.

Naturally, thinking of keeping antimatter in your pocket is suicide, because any contact with matter will result in an explosion. So, how do you store it?
The logical way to store it is using a magnetic hollow “doughnut”. (mathematical name - Torus)
First, we strip the antiatom from its positrons. Then it is electrically charged – called an anti-ion.

Then, we hurl the anti-ion inside a vacuumed hollow doughnut that has an intense magnetic field piercing through it perpendicularly. The magnetic field will deflect the path of the particle into a circular track. And the anti-ion is trapped inside!

Angels and Demons : Antimatter (Part I)

Today is the premiere of Dan Brown’s “Angels and Demons”. Ever wonder what exactly antimatter is? In the book, the description of antimatter is a little misleading.



Here, I want to discuss about antimatter.

In the book, the antimatter is used as the primary fuel in the bomb to destroy The Vatican. The fact is, with that amount mentioned in the book, the bomb is capable to do much more damage than it is in the story.

As a matter of fact, antimatter is one of the MOST efficient explosives in the universe. Converting all its mass to pure energy.



So, What IS antimatter?

Antimatter is quite simply, the “opposite” of ordinary matter. A mirror image of it, sort of speak. It’s like matter’s evil twin.

At the early 20th century, physicist knows about atoms. They know atoms are made of protons and electrons. Take Hydrogen for example, they know it is a proton that is the nucleus of the atom and an electron orbiting it.

But in the 1930’s, physicist realised for every particle, there’s an antiparticle for it. They discovered electrons evil twin – the antielectron (a.k.a Positron)

The discovery of positron. Bend the opposite direction as electrons in magnetic field. Sharper bend above the plate indicate that the particle has lose energy, means the particle come from the bottom of the plate.

What’s so special about the positron is, the positron has the SAME mass as the electron, but with the exact opposite charge. For example, electron is negative charged, the positron is well, positively charged.

Interactions between matter and antimatter.

Now, the interaction between ordinary matter and antimatter is crucial. It is explosive. What happens is, when you bring matter and antimatter in contact, they will undergo a very fast process called annihilation.

An example, if you bring in an electron, collide it with an antielectron, BOTH particles will disappear from the face of this universe and because both the conservation of energy and momentum must be obeyed, the resulting missing mass will generate packets of pure energy in a form of gamma rays that travel in perpendicular direction of the collision.

Feynman diagram shows an electron-positron pair annihilation event, turn into gamma ray photon and re-convert back to positron-electron pair.

Keep in mind that, in all atomic bomb detonations, only 1% of the fuel (uranium/plutonium) will be converted into energy.

Antimatter convert 100% of its mass to energy. So, it is vastly more powerful than the atomic bomb. (well, more accurately, >50% of the antimatter will be converted to usable energy. The rest are converted into neutrinos – tiny particles that are very hard to detect due to its inert nature.)