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At an astonishing price of $62 trillion per gram (£49 trillion), antimatter stands as the most expensive substance on Earth. However, even with unlimited financial resources, acquiring a gram of antimatter remains virtually impossible due to its rarity and the immense challenges involved in its production.
Unlike gold, diamonds, or rare metals, antimatter cannot be mined or extracted from the Earth. Instead, it must be meticulously created atom by atom in a highly controlled environment—a process that could take billions of years to accumulate even a fraction of a gram.
What Is Antimatter?
It is often described as the “mirror image” of regular matter. It consists of antiparticles that have the same properties as ordinary particles but with opposite electrical charges. For instance, while protons in normal matter have a positive charge, antiprotons possess a negative charge. These antiparticles can theoretically form anti-atoms, antimolecules, and even entire antimatter planets or galaxies that would function similarly to our own.
The primary challenge with it lies in its interaction with regular matter. When matter and antimatter come into contact, they annihilate each other, releasing an enormous amount of energy. This makes antimatter incredibly difficult to store and study, as it disappears almost immediately upon creation.
The Astronomical Price of Antimatter
In 1999, NASA scientist Harold Gerrish estimated it’s at $62.5 trillion per gram, or approximately $1.75 quadrillion per ounce. While he predicted that costs might eventually decrease, advancements in physics have only underscored the immense engineering challenges involved, suggesting the price could be even higher.
Professor Michael Doser, a particle physicist at CERN, highlighted it’s scarcity, telling ABC News: “We make such minute quantities that even if you were to destroy all the antimatter that we’re making in the course of a year, it wouldn’t be even enough to boil a cup of tea. One 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold.”
New antimatter is constantly being generated in small quantities throughout the universe, including within the human body. For example, when radioactive elements such as potassium decay, they emit a positron, the antimatter counterpart of an electron. This means that a banana, which is rich in radioactive potassium, produces roughly one particle per hour. However, these particles are instantly annihilated by surrounding matter, making them useless for scientific study.
Creating and Storing
To produce it in a controlled setting, scientists must generate it using immense amounts of energy. At CERN, researchers utilize powerful particle accelerators to propel protons at high speeds before colliding them with an iridium target. In approximately one in a million collisions, a particle of matter and its counterpart are created simultaneously.
These particles are then collected using a specialized machine known as the Antiproton Decelerator, which employs powerful magnets to contain them and slow them to one-tenth the speed of light. However, the process is extremely energy-intensive—CERN’s particle accelerators consume about 90% of the research center’s annual 1,250-gigawatt energy expenditure. To put this into perspective, London consumes an estimated 37,800 gigawatts annually.
Despite the tremendous effort, CERN only produces nanograms of it each year, keeping its cost exorbitantly high. But manufacturing it is only one part of the challenge—storing it is even more difficult. Since antimatter is instantly annihilated upon contact with regular matter, it must be contained within a vacuum and held in place using supercooled magnetic fields.
Currently, the record for storing it is 405 days for individual particles and just 17 minutes for complete anti-atoms. Researchers at CERN are testing methods to transport antimatter outside the lab using magnetic “bottles.” However, a recent test successfully moved only 70 regular matter protons—far below even a nanogram of antimatter.
Why Study Antimatter?
Given the extreme difficulty and cost of producing antimatter, one might wonder why scientists continue their research into this elusive substance. The answer lies in its potential to unlock fundamental mysteries about the universe.
At the dawn of the universe, scientists believe that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created. If they had annihilated each other completely, there would be no leftover matter to form the galaxies, stars, and planets we see today. However, for reasons still unknown, matter prevailed, and antimatter remains scarce. Understanding this asymmetry could reshape our understanding of the cosmos.
If there is no fundamental difference between matter and antimatter, another possibility is that antimatter exists in separate, undiscovered regions of the universe. If such antimatter galaxies exist, they remain hidden just beyond our reach.
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