Antimatter is the most expensive substance in the world, estimated at $1.771 trillion USD per ounce ($62.5 trillion USD per gram) for antihydrogen. It is difficult and expensive to produce, trap, and store. Antimatter has potential uses as rocket fuel and in revealing the laws of physics. Nuclear isomers are another expensive substance, potentially costing over $28 billion per ounce ($1 billion per gram), but their use as energy storage or weapons is still uncertain.
In terms of production costs, the most expensive substance in the world is antimatter. The cost of creating this material has been estimated at around $1.771 trillion US dollars (USD) per ounce ($62.5 trillion US dollars per gram), although some authorities think it could eventually come down to just $141.75 billion US dollars per ounce (US$5 billion per gram). gram). This is the cost of antihydrogen, the simplest form of this type of substance, and the antimatter equivalent of the element hydrogen. Other anti-elements would be even more expensive. As of 2013, only a small number of antihydrogen atoms have been produced – for research purposes only – and the substance is not available for sale.
Why is antimatter so expensive?
Antimatter is made up of particles that can be considered the opposites of their normal matter counterparts. The matter with which people are familiar is made up of atoms, which consist of a nucleus containing heavy, positively charged particles, called protons, surrounded by a “cloud” of light, negatively charged electrons. Antimatter atoms have negatively charged antiprotons in their nucleus, surrounded by positively charged antielectrons, usually called positrons. Although antiprotons have been detected in cosmic rays and positrons are emitted by some radioactive elements, there is no known natural source of antiatoms, so antimatter must be produced.
Positrons can be obtained fairly easily from the materials that emit them, but the much heavier antiprotons must be created in particle colliders, machines that send subatomic particles crashing into each other and other materials at enormous speeds. These collisions concentrate enormous amounts of energy into extremely small volumes of space, resulting in the creation of matter in the form of particles and antiparticles, including antiprotons. These can be magnetically separated and combined with positrons to form antihydrogen atoms.
Because these anti-atoms can only be produced in a handful of structures and only in small quantities, antihydrogen is extremely scarce. Not only is it difficult and expensive to make, but it is also difficult to trap and store. Antiatoms are strongly attracted to normal atoms, due to electrons and positrons having opposite electric charges, and when they meet they annihilate each other, transforming all their mass into energy. The storage involves vacuum-sealed containers that prevent the antiatoms from touching the sides using magnetic fields. These factors combine to make antimatter the most expensive substance in the world.
Uses for antimatter
Scientists wouldn’t bother producing this substance if it didn’t have some potential uses. Antimatter has the greatest energy density of any fuel, meaning it has the potential to release more energy per unit of weight than any other substance. Since even more energy is required to produce antimatter than can be obtained, it is not a solution to the planet’s energy problems; however, it has been proposed as a possible future rocket fuel, as it could, in theory, accelerate a payload to a substantial fraction of the speed of light. For now, however, its main interest to scientists lies in what it can reveal about the laws of physics.
Other expensive substances
Still in the realm of exotic physics, nuclear isomers, even if somewhat inferior to the world’s most expensive substance, would come with an extremely high price — perhaps over $28 billion per ounce ($1 billion per gram). These are elements in which the atomic nucleus has more than its minimum amount of energy – the minimum is known as the “ground state”. In most cases, a nucleus in this “excited” state will return to its ground state within a small fraction of a second, releasing energy in the form of gamma rays, but some nuclear isomers, such as hafnium-178 m2 and tantalum- 180 m, are relatively stable and long-lived. Under normal circumstances, these isomers release energy slowly, as their nuclei randomly return over a long period.
Experiments in the 1990s appeared to demonstrate that a sample of hafnium-178 m2 could be primed to return to the ground state all at once, releasing large amounts of energy, by bombarding it with X-rays. This raised the possibility of using the isomer to store energy or to develop new types of weapons. Attempts to reproduce the effect, however, have so far failed and many scientists are very skeptical of these possibilities. As with antimatter, these substances must be produced in expensive particle colliders and are only available in small quantities.
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