Is there anything that lies beyond fusion?
When hydrogen undergoes fusion and becomes helium, only 0.7% of the
original mass of the hydrogen is converted to energy. Is it possible to
take a quantity of mass and convert all of it, every bit, to energy?
Surely that would be the ultimate energy source. Mass for mass, that
would deliver 140 times as much energy as hydrogen fusion would; it
would be as far beyond hydrogen fusion as hydrogen fusion is beyond
uranium fission.
And, as a matter of fact, total annihilation of matter is conceivable
under some circumstances.
In 1928 the English physicist Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902- )
presented a treatment of the electron’s properties that made it appear
as though there ought also to exist a particle exactly like the electron
in every respect except that it would be opposite in charge. It would
carry a positive electric charge exactly as large as the electron’s
negative one.
If the electron is a particle, this suggested positively charged twin
would be an “antiparticle”. (The prefix comes from a Greek word meaning
“opposite”.)
[Illustration: _P. A. M. Dirac_]
[Illustration: _The first picture of the positron (left) was taken in a
Wilson cloud chamber. On the right is C. D. Anderson, the discoverer of
the positron._]
The proton is _not_ the electron’s antiparticle. Though a proton carries
the necessary positive charge that is exactly as large as the negative
charge of the electron, the proton has a much larger mass than the
electron has. Dirac’s theory required that the antiparticle have the
same mass as the particle to which it corresponded.
In 1932 C. D. Anderson was studying the impact of cosmic particles on
lead. In the process, he discovered signs of a particle that left tracks
exactly like those of an electron, but tracks that curved the wrong way
in a magnetic field. This was a sure sign that it had an electric charge
opposite to that of the electron. He had, in short, discovered the
electron’s antiparticle and this came to be called the “positron”.
Positrons were soon detected elsewhere too. Some radioactive isotopes,
formed in the laboratory by the Joliot-Curies and by others, were found
to emit positive beta particles—positrons rather than electrons. When an
ordinary beta particle, or electron, was emitted from a nucleus, a
neutron within the nucleus was converted to a proton. When a positive
beta particle, a positron, was emitted, the reverse happened—a proton
was converted to a neutron.
A positron, however, does not endure long after formation. All about it
were atoms containing electrons. It could not move for more than a
millionth of a second or so before it encountered one of those
electrons. When it did, there was an attraction between the two, since
they were of opposite electric charge. Briefly they might circle each
other (to form a combination called “positronium”) but only very
briefly. Then they collided and, since they were opposites, each
cancelled the other.
The process whereby an electron and a positron met and cancelled is
called “mutual annihilation”. Not everything was gone, though. The mass,
in disappearing, was converted into the equivalent amount of energy,
which made its appearance in the form of one or more gamma rays.
(It works the other way, too. A gamma ray of sufficient energy can be
transformed into an electron and a positron. This phenomenon, called
“pair production”, was observed as early as 1930 but was only properly
understood after the discovery of the positron.)
Of course, the mass of electrons and positrons is very small and the
amount of energy released per electron is not enormously high. Still,
Dirac’s original theory of antiparticles was not confined to electrons.
By his theory, any particle ought to have some corresponding
antiparticle. Corresponding to the proton, for instance, there ought to
be an “antiproton”. This would be just as massive as the proton and
would carry a negative charge just as large as the proton’s positive
charge.
An antiproton, however, is 1836 times as massive as a positron. It would
take gamma rays or cosmic particles with 1836 times as much energy to
form the proton-antiproton pair as would suffice for the
electron-positron pair. Cosmic particles of the necessary energies
existed but they were rare and the chance of someone being present with
a particle detector just as a rare super-energetic cosmic particle
happened to form a proton-antiproton pair was very small.
[Illustration: _The Bevatron began operation in 1954._]
Physicists had to wait until they had succeeded in designing particle
accelerators that would produce enough energy to allow the creation of
proton-antiproton pairs. This came about in the early 1950s when a
device called the “Cosmotron” was built at Brookhaven National
Laboratory in Long Island in 1952 and another called the “Bevatron” at
the University of California in Berkeley in 1954.
Using the Bevatron in 1956, Segrè (the discoverer of technetium who had,
by that time, emigrated to the United States), the American physicist
Owen Chamberlain (1920- ), and others succeeded in detecting the
antiproton.
The antiproton was as unlikely to last as long as the positron was. It
was surrounded by myriads of proton-containing nuclei and in a tiny
fraction of a second it would encounter one. The antiproton and the
proton also underwent mutual annihilation, but having 1836 times the
mass, they produced 1836 times the energy that was produced in the case
of an electron and a positron.
There was even an “antineutron”, a particle reported in 1956 by the
Italian-American physicist Oreste Piccioni (1915- ) and his
co-workers. Since the neutron has no charge, the antineutron has no
charge either, and one might wonder how the antineutron would differ
from the neutron then. Actually, both have a small magnetic field. In
the neutron the magnetic field is pointed in one direction with
reference to the neutron’s spin; in the antineutron it is pointed in the
other.
[Illustration: _Bubble chamber photograph of an antiproton
annihilation._]
In 1965 the American physicist Leon Max Lederman (1922- ) and his
co-workers produced a combination of an antiproton and an antineutron
that together formed an “antideuteron”, which is the nucleus of
antihydrogen-2.
This is good enough to demonstrate that if antiparticles existed by
themselves without the interfering presence of ordinary particles, they
could form “antimatter”, which would be precisely identical with
ordinary matter in every way except for the fact that electric charges
and magnetic fields would be turned around.
If antimatter were available to us, and if we could control the manner
in which it united with matter, we would have a source of energy much
greater and, perhaps, simpler to produce than would be involved in
hydrogen fusion.
To be sure, there is no antimatter on earth, except for the
submicroscopic amounts that are formed by the input of tremendous
energies. Nor does anyone know of any conceivable way of forming
antimatter at less energy than that produced by mutual annihilation, so
that we might say that mankind can never make an energy profit out of
it—except that with the memory of Rutherford’s prediction that nuclear
energy of any kind could never be tapped, one hesitates to be
pessimistic about anything.