Gamma Lasers and Antimatter

This article has tons of sciency stuff that might make you think that we can now create a Hulk at warp speed, but then you find out that it might be used to find ass polyps or something.

From Fox here:

Building gamma-ray lasers powered by an exotic hybrid of matter and antimatter may sound like science fiction, but scientists are now a step closer to doing it.

Whereas the wavelengths of traditional lasers run the gamut from infared to X-rays, a gamma-ray laser relies on light waves even smaller than X-rays. For instance, the antimatter-powered laser would produce light with wavelengths a thousandth the size of modern-day X-ray lasers, enabling it to probe incredibly tiny spaces and making it useful in medical imaging technology.

In the new research, (science guys) detailed how a special type of matter-antimatter mixture called positronium would work as the gain medium, the material that turns ordinary light into a laser beam.

This weird effect has to do with the very nature of positronium. Each positronium “atom” is actually an ordinary electron and a positron, or the antimatter equivalent of an electron. Electrons are negatively charged, while positrons are positively charged. When the two touch, they annihilate and release two photons light at high energies, in the gamma-ray range, moving in opposite directions.

To make a gamma-ray laser, scientists would need to make the positronium really cold close to absolute zero (minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273 degrees Celsius). That chilling process turns the positronium into a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, in which all the atoms or, in this case, electron-positron pairs enter the same quantum state, essentially acting as a single supersized atom.

One aspect of quantum state is spin, which is numbered minus 1/2 or 1/2. In the positronium, the spins (of the electron and positron) must add up to 1 or 0. When they add up to 1, the positronium takes a fraction of a nanosecond longer to annihilate itself. In that bit of a second, the Bose-Einstein condensate is made up largely of spin-1 positronium.

Yeah, yeah. A very expensive way to do medical imaging. I’d rather have super soldiers and warp drive.