Stupid Questions

I just read a post on io9 that asked a question that irks me to no end regarding money and science.  Is it worth spending a crap-ton of money to prove [insert some science-y thing here] right/wrong?  That's the question?  I never really had a good counter argument that I really liked until I saw a fellow reader's comment back.  It went along the lines of "if we can spend crap-tons of money on movies that suck, why not on something more constructive like furthering humanity's knowledge."  Booya!  

Now, don't get me wrong.  I enjoy a beautiful CG romp of mayhem and destruction as much as the next guy, but if the plot is going to be crap it just isn't worth it.  This guy listed, among others, Transformers and the Star Wars prequels and I have to agree.  Big movies and all the money went into big names and fancy CG.  So what do we have?  2-3 hours of cool special effects, bad plot and a coaster (if you bought the movie).  I just wish that whoever funded these works of suck would consider sacrificing one movie's budget to fund a science project.  (Note: if they already do this, let me know and I'll apologize).  

To summarize, it is a ridiculous question to ask when so much money is spent on other less useful things.  But it does not have to be just on science either!  Sacrifice a movie and feed some people for a month or restore a poisoned water supply or anything like that.  I would love to hear about that happening as well.  It's just that this article was related to science so that is the first thing I thought about.  

GSI Facility in Darmstadt

No, it isn't some fancy acronym from a Command & Conquer video game.  It's the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany and I went to visit it Friday afternoon.  They have a linear accelerator (UNILAC), the accelerating synchrotron (SIS), the Experiment Storage Ring (ESR) and Fragment Separator (FRS).  It also has several other experiments set up along with a tumor therapy room.  Lest all this sound uninteresting, this is the place that put elements 107-112 on the periodic table!  Meitnerium (1982), Hassium (1984), Darmstadtium (1994), Roentgenium (1994), Bohrium (1996), and Copernicium (1996) were all created/discovered here.  Ha!  And I stood next to the machines that did it.  It was astonishing.

That tumor therapy contraption was pretty interesting as well.  Heavy ion beams are shot at a person's head for example.  The beam is made up of carbon ions, instead of the old X-ray, and these ions release all of their energy at one particular point.  Here is a picture of the Bragg Curve courtesy of Wikipedia.  

 This particular curve is for alpha particles, but X-rays don't even have that peak. They only gradually die out in energy. Carbon ions, on the other hand, have an even sharper peak than the one in this picture.  That means the technicians and scientists know exactly where, distance-wise, the ion will release all of its energy after leaving the vacuum area of the accelerator.  If they hold your head still, they have millimeter precision with targeting and destroying a tumor.  Kind of crazy when you think about it.  I would feel a little nervous about having my head at the butt end of a particle beam that just got up to 90% light speed in 2 seconds.

This picture of the facility (sorry it's a little hard to read) was taken from the GSI page linked to here.  In it you can see the blue part is the existing facility which I got to walk through (mostly).  The red is the future and it will be awesome.  With the things they can already do, I can only imagine what they'll find out with more experiments and more powerful accelerators.  I said 'mostly' earlier because they had experiments going on at the time we were there, meaning the accelerators were active and that means everything was bottled up because of radiation.  A few experiments were not being used so we did get to see some of the detectors up close and personal.  The other experiments were trapped behind locked gates with radiation 'airlock' rooms and meters worth of concrete walls.  I'm hoping to get to go back and see it again.  I still don't get particle physics, because I'm just a simple astronomer, but I do appreciate the complicated stuff they do here to better understand the universe.  

By the by, the tumor therapy room is just below and a little to the left of the ESR ring.

Pseudo Anti-Deuterons

Today in my Methods and Applications of Atomic Physics class, we discussed antiparticles and CPT symmetry conservation (Charge conjugation, Parity and Time reversal).  The CPT thing is not what I'd like to discuss.

I know that having a particle interact with its antiparticle results in mutual annihilation accompanied by a release of energy.  I asked my professor what the possibilities are for gaining energy for free by using our available energy to create an antiproton that would then collide with a proton that we didn't have to work to get.  In case that made no sense this is what I meant: (No energy expended proton source) + (some energy expended antiproton source) = More energy than we put in coming back.  He said that it takes a crap-ton (rough estimate) of energy to make antiparticles currently.  Also, the number of antiparticles the world has thus far created, although numbering in the millions (if not billions), would hardly heat a cup of water if allowed to annihilate.  Drat.

My second question was a little more abstract.  I began with making sure I understood the matter-antimatter combination.  An antiproton will only annihilate with a proton, a positron will only annihilate with an electron, and so forth, right?  He didn't sound so sure but I asked my next question anyway.  What would happen if you could put an antiproton with a regular neutron?  A normal proton and neutron form the nucleus of deuterium also know as heavy hydrogen.  45 years ago we had already made antideuterium (antiproton with antineutron), but I want to know what would happen if you could mix different matter and antimatter particles.  He said he did not know but he guessed it would be bad (his words!).  

I really don't know what the point of such a particle would be, but I suppose that since the antiproton is made up of antiquarks the annihilation would come from the quarks messing with each other.  Just wanted to share those thoughts.  Does anybody know anything about this?  Has it been done?