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Antimatter Generation With The Help Of A Plasma Globe

Physics Asked by sciencepiofficial on October 28, 2021

I know this sounds absurd, but after doing a little research I found that it may be possible (not entirely, but that is why I am asking about this here). I have been reading up on antimatter and quantum mechanics and I stumbled across this article on the subject of "creating antimatter with lightning". All lightning is is a stream of electrons travelling through a channel of ionised air. This is true of any electrical "arc". This brings me to my question. There is a trick which you can do with plasma globes (you can probably pick one up at a toy store quite easily), where you place a piece of aluminium foil on the top of the globe which attracts a stream of electrons via parasitic capacitance the the environment. However, I have put together a specialised spark-gap chamber which consists of two metal rods with sharp points ~0.2mm apart so that an arc jumps the gap. I attached a wire from the aluminium foil on the plasma globe to one of the electrodes, and I connected the other to ground. When I switched on the plasma globe, as expected, a small arc jumped the gap.

This experiment, while much less powerful (about 900,000 times less powerful) than lightning, does simulate it to some degree (with a constant flow of electrons with AC current instead of a small pulse of electrons with pulse current).

So if lightning can emit antiprotons and positrons, can my setup do the same?

One Answer

Lightning producing postitrons, i.e. the antiparticle of the electron can be seen here

In a collaborative study appearing in Nature, researchers from Japan describe how gamma rays from lightning react with the air to produce radioisotopes and even positrons—the antimatter equivalent of electrons.

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The gamma rays emitted in lightning have enough energy to knock a neutron out of atmospheric nitrogen,

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The final, prolonged emission was from the breakdown of now neutron-poor and unstable nitrogen atoms. These released positrons, which subsequently collided with electrons in annihilation events releasing gamma rays.

So it is not exactly pair creation. The energy of a lightning bolt is very large and gammas produced in order to create pairs of electron positrons would have to be at least 1MeV in energy.

The sparks in a spark gap in the lab do not have enough energy to generate gamma rays.

Answered by anna v on October 28, 2021

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