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A technician works on the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) ring

Interview with Rolf Landua

... a CERN physicist who could have inspired Dan Brown, author of the book ‘Angels and Demons’ for his character Leonardo Vetra

Rolf Landua was the spokesperson of the experiment ATHENA at CERN, which produced thousands of antiatoms. This interview is given to the Italian magazine ‘Newton’.

Did you like Angels and Demons?

Rolf LanduaYes, very much so. Clearly, the author took some artistic liberty in his description of CERN, but the book does not pretend to be an accurate representation of reality. I only wish that we really had futuristic buildings, large private funding, or a private scram jet - only NASA has an experimental version. Although the 27km long LHC will really exist in 2007, our true antimatter factory is called the 'Antiproton Decelerator (AD)', and is much smaller. But never mind - I loved the 'treasure hunt' - it inspired me to use the concept for some fun educational activity in this 'World Year of Physics' 2005.

What do you think of Leonardo Vetra, the character in the book who might be you?

In the book, Leonardo Vetra is a CERN physicist working on trapping antimatter, similar to my own research. But Leonardo is also a priest, and that is where the similarity ends. He seems to believe in a personified image of God with a specific interest in our Earth, a small and rather insignificant part of the Universe, but I do not share his view. For me, the physical laws that rule our Universe and that are manifest in each point of space and time, like 'cosmic DNA', are much easier to accept as an image of God, if one wants to use this term.

In Angels and Demons, the protagonist Robert Langdon witnesses a matter-antimatter annihilation: a sample of antimatter is let loose to join matter, immediately annihilates and liberates a huge quantity of energy. Is this possible?

Antimatter challenges our intuition about matter. Imagine a solid object, like a coin. Bring it together with an "anti-coin", and both disappear into a flash of energy. It seems impossible that apparently solid things just evaporate into radiation, but this is exactly what happens!

According to Dan Brown, "antimatter is the ultimate energy source. It releases energy with 100% efficiency (nuclear fission is 1.5% efficient). Antimatter is 100 000 times more powerful than rocket fuel. A single gram contains the energy of a 20 kiloton atomic bomb - the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima." But, unlike a nuclear reaction, it doesn't leave any harmful or polluting debris. Is this true?

I am a science fiction fan and regretfully I have to say Dan Brown is wrong. It is true that the encounter of one gram of matter with one gram of antimatter could release the same quantity of energy as the one released by a 20 Kiloton atom bomb. But there is a major problem: antihydrogen, which is made by one antiproton and one positron, is not an energy source. Making antimatter wastes a lot of energy, because there are no "antimatter mines" from which we could take antimatter in order to liberate the stored energy. Even if antimatter existed somewhere in our part of the Universe, it would have disappeared a long time ago because of annihilations with ordinary matter.

At CERN, we make antimatter by colliding accelerated particles at very high energies, thus transforming kinetic energy into mass. However, even if we could manipulate the laws governing the production process, we would still have to face the law of energy conservation that forbids getting more energy out than we put in. In reality, producing antimatter is a very inefficient process, only transforming about a billionth of the primary energy into an antimatter particle.

Is it possible to make bombs with antimatter?

No, thanks to the inefficiency of the transformation process of energy into antimatter we are safe. We do not have to worry about military applications. As an example, take Dan Brown's hypothetical 1 gram of antimatter. With present CERN technology, we would be able to produce about 10 ng of antimatter per year, at a cost of about 10-20 M$. Then we would have to deal with the problem of how to store so many particles (about 10,000,000,000,000,000 antiprotons). Obviously, it would take 100 million years - and 1000 trillion $ - to make one gram. This appears ambitious even for the US military. And why construct a 20 kT antihydrogen bomb when thousand times more powerful (hydrogen) bombs do already exist in the stockpiles of the superpowers? Therefore I do not believe that antimatter will present us with a "chilling dilemma".

In the novel, Dan Brown defines antimatter as "extremely unstable, in addition to being highly explosive, and it ignites when it comes in contact with anything... even air". Is it really so difficult to store antimatter?

Indeed, Dan Brown's description is completely accurate. The worst enemy of antimatter researchers is … air, and - of course - all other matter. Antimatter has to be kept away from the walls of the apparatus, in an extremely good vacuum such as we find in outer space. We are using very sophisticated technologies and an extremely cold environment (close to absolute zero) to make sure that the precious antiprotons do not encounter (matter) atoms on their way - otherwise we would lose them immediately.

Leonardo Vetra in the book uses electromagnetic fields to keep antimatter suspended in vacuum, far from the container's walls. Is this technique the same you use in your lab?

More or less. The ingredients of antimatter atoms, namely antiprotons and positrons, are charged and can easily be manipulated using electric and magnetic fields. Once an antihydrogen atom has formed, it is electrically neutral, and it gets much more difficult to capture it. Until now, nobody has succeeded in storing antihydrogen atoms, but that is exactly our next goal. My research at present is focused on constructing such a trap for antihydrogen, just as described in Dan Brown's story. So he is still a step ahead of us, but the science is trying to catch up with the fiction.

Are there already any practical applications of antimatter?

Antimatter has already found one technological application in medical diagnostics, namely in 'Positron Emission Tomography': It uses positron-emitting atoms, attached to specific molecules, that are injected to visualize specific parts of the body through detection of the annihilation radiation. More futuristic is the possible use of antiprotons in medical therapy, for cancer treatment for example: can antiprotons be used to destroy cancer cells more efficiently? We don't know for sure, and therefore an experiment is done at CERN to study the biological effects of antimatter annihilation. Closer to science fiction is the use of antimatter as a kind of matchstick for fission-powered space vessels. But as usual, trying to answer such a question can only make me look silly, because history shows that scientists are notoriously wrong when predicting the future. Just look at statements from the 1960s on the use of lasers or computers for a good laugh.

August 2005