Antimatter weapon

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Antimatter
Antiparticles Positron Antiproton Antineutron Antihydrogen Antihelium Onia Antiprotonic hydrogen Antiprotonic helium Muonium True muonium Pionium Positronium Quarkonium
Concepts and phenomena Annihilation Baryogenesis Baryon asymmetry Comet CP violation Gravitational interaction Positron emission
Devices Cloud chamber Particle accelerator Antiproton decelerator Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider Penning trap
Uses Positron emission tomography Fuel Weapon
People and bodies Carl David Anderson Paul Dirac Andrei Sakharov CERN
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An antimatter weapon is a theoretically possible device using antimatter as a power source, a propellant, or an explosive for a weapon. Antimatter weapons are currently too costly and unreliable to be viable in warfare, as producing antimatter is enormously expensive (estimated at $6 billion for every 100 nanograms), the quantities of antimatter generated are very small, and current technology has great difficulty containing antimatter, which annihilates upon touching ordinary matter.^[1]

The paramount advantage of such a theoretical weapon is that antimatter and matter collisions result in the entire sum of their mass energy equivalent being released as energy, which is at least two orders of magnitude greater than the energy release of the most efficient fusion weapons (100% vs 0.4–1%).^[2] Annihilation requires and converts exactly equal masses of antimatter and matter by the collision which releases the entire mass-energy of both, which for 1 gram is ~9×10¹³ joules. Using the convention that 1 kiloton TNT equivalent = 4.184×10¹² joules (or one trillion calories of energy), one half gram of antimatter reacting with one half gram of ordinary matter (one gram total) results in 21.5 kilotons-equivalent of energy (the same as the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945).^[3]