Innovative Antimatter Production Technologies

Current antiproton production techniques rely on high energy collisions between beam particles and target nuclei to produce particle and antiparticle pairs from vacuum, but inherently low production and capture efficiencies make these techniques inadequate for the cost-effective production of antimatter for space propulsion and other commercial applications. An innovative antimatter production technique is proposed in which quantum mechanical deBroglie wavefunctions are phase conjugated to produce antimatter using a process analogous to optical four-wave mixing. An interference pattern is created by the superposition of an object particle beam and reference particle beam traversing a nonlinear medium, which has a lattice spacing of the same beam traversing a nonlinear medium, which has a lattice spacing of the same relative magnitude as the particle deBroglie wavelengths. The medium deforms due to the interference pattern and diffracts a second counterpropagating reference beam, creating a phase conjugate (antimatter) beam which retraces the original object beam path. The object beam simultaneously interacts with the second reference beam to create an interference pattern which diffracts the first reference beam, producing an amplified object beam. The amplified object (particle) beam and phase conjugate (antiparticle) beam are created at the expense of the two reference beam wave energies in a process fundamentally different than current high energy pair production techniques.| Benefits: The proposed technology may provide a cost effective method to produce antimatter in sufficient quantities for spacecraft propulsion and other commercial applications, including on-site medical radiation treatments, nondestructive material testing, and material processing applications.|