Why is anti-matter so expensive?

[Akpolarbears]

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.

[swansont]

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.

[Akpolarbears]

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...

[John Cuthber]

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.

[JonG]

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.

[J.C.MacSwell]

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!"