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Old 09-05-2017, 10:17 PM   #64
lwcamp
 
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: The plutonium rich regions of Washington State
Default Re: [Spaceships] Anti-Lithium for Drives – Does this work?

Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
You would need a much more powerful magnet than 10 Teslas to even trap a gram of antimatter. Just using a back of the envelope calculation, you would need a 1 million Telsa magnetic field to contain a gram of antimatter for a prolonged period of time (the attraction between antimatter and matter is probably one of the most powerful forces in the Universe). Anything less is just as much handwavium as force fields and other forms of superscience.
You can levitate several gram objects with fields of around 15 tesla, such as the frog mentioned in a previous post
http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/
because the electromagnetic force does not care about whether something is matter or antimatter (C, or charge conjugation, symmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-symmetry), several grams of antimatter would be subject to the same force by the same field.

Bulk, charge neutral antimatter would experience no additional forces compared to bulk charge neutral matter. There is no special attraction between antimatter and matter that does not exist between matter itself (that is, the antimatter's matter counterpart would be just as attracted or repelled from another piece of matter as the antimatter itself). C-symmetry again. A lump of anti-lithium (or an anti-frog) would be levitated against Earth's gravity by the same strength field (although an anti-frog would need anti-air around it to breathe, which might have adverse consequences on your magnets).

Luke
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