Do Antiparticle Beams Inflict Rad Damage?

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Realistically, antimatter is a really cruddy way to deliver blast effects on a scale smaller than nuclear weapons, and a great way to kill people with radiation. That's because the vast majority of the energy release from antimatter annihilation is in the form of penetrating radiation, and at small enough scales the energy is too diffuse to produce a shockwave at all.

If you annihilate antiprotons on heavy nuclei, you can get much of the energy going into the nucleus to fragment it into various high energy bits (primarily by nuclear capture of the annihilation pions that are created right on the surface of the nucleus). The resulting nuclear fragments dump their energy quickly into any surrounding matter, resulting in localized heating. Sure, it leaves a radioactive mess, and you do get plenty of penetrating radiation from the pions moving away from the target nucleus, but you also get a fireball.

Luke