I was reading an article about anti-matter and I understand how it works and the difficulties in containing it. But the article also said it cost around 65 trillion dollars per gram. Why is this? I can see the machines costing that much but after you have it why is each gram so much? Does it cost 65 trillion in electricity?

 

Thanks.

Production is really inefficient and the machines that make it in any quantity cost billions to make. The $65 trillion number is scaled from the fact that we only ever have a tiny fraction of a gram on hand at any time someone tries to store it. We've not made anywhere close to a gram of it. A gram of antiprotons would be Avogadro's number of them. If you made 1 antiproton per collision with some target and a proton beam of 100 microamps (6.25e14 per second), it would take you > 30 years to make a gram.

 

Electrons would take ~1800 times longer in that scenario, since they are lighter.

After quite a bit more reading I think I understand the production process a bit better.. And thanks for clarifying the $65 trillion thing, it seemed like way to big of a number to have been spent on anti-matter research. I'll have to read up more though...

Antimatter is free. It rains down from the sky as part of the cosmic radiation to which the Earth is exposed.

Harvesting it would be a challenge.

This could be yet another example of the current day tendency to attach ridiculous figures to the cost of projects which have never been done. No one has made a whole gram of antimatter in one go. The cost of doing so seems to be just guesswork. There is little to support it and little to contradict it.

This reminds me of the old joke on being handed a ticket "70 miles/hour...but officer I haven't even been driving for an hour!"