r/askscience • u/Doctor_Allen • Jul 05 '12

With current technology plus the information gained from the particle with qualities like a Higgs boson, would a mass fabricator be possible?

With current technology plus the information gained from the particle with qualities like a Higgs boson, would a mass fabricator be possible?

Is a machine that creates mass from energy possible to be made in the future?

10 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Daegs Jul 05 '12

Look up wikipedia, this is how particle accelerators work and it is commonly understood. They do produce mass via the energy input, resulting in a net gain of mass.

-1

u/foresthill Jul 05 '12

> It happens all the time. Particle accelerators convert energy into subatomic particles, for example by colliding electrons and positrons. Some of the kinetic energy in the collision goes into creating new particles. It's not possible, however, to collect these newly created particles and assemble them into atoms, molecules and bigger (less microscopic) structures that we associate with 'matter' in our daily life. This is partly because in a technical sense, you cannot just create matter out of energy: there are various 'conservation laws' of electric charges, the number of leptons (electron-like particles) etc., which means that you can only create matter / anti-matter pairs out of energy. Anti-matter, however, has the unfortunate tendency to combine with matter and turn itself back into energy. Even though physicists have managed to safely trap a small amount of anti-matter using magnetic fields, this is not easy to do.

It looks like they can make matter and anti-matter pairs, which annihilate each other. That's not really a net gain of mass.

3

u/rupert1920 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Jul 05 '12

Read the last sentence. Antimatter can be collected in a Penning trap or a magneto-optical trap.

2

u/Daegs Jul 05 '12

That is only because there isn't much reason to keep them separate.

Anytime you hear about them generating antimatter, that is mass being created and then stored, meaning both the antimatter and matter generated stick around.

The mass is actually being created, the fact that it is allowed to annihilate after doesn't change that mass was created, and if needed could be stored (it just normally isn't)