Antimatter filled buckyballs - The energy storage medium of the future

Antimatter gets used a lot in SciFi due to it's mind-bending energy density. If you can store it in a form that requires no power and is at least mildly idiot-proof then you've just solved half of your space-civilisation's energy problems. However, all of our current technologies have a drawback, either they require a power source¹, they don't scale well², have poor containment time³ or all of the above.

Now Carbon buckyballs are amazing things, they are quite stable, can be made with an arc welder and some pencils, they're not particularly toxic (unless you inhale a fine cloud of them) and they even "dissolve" in common hydrocarbons⁴.

Now, given that single ions have been trapped in Carbon buckyballs before... could we also store an antimatter ion inside one?

Lots of molecules have electric dipoles (which work a lot like magnets... just, without the magnets), if the buckyball was doped so that it had a couple dipoles on the inside pointing towards the single antimatter ion, could it be used to make a molecular Penning trap?

Note: Full-blown scientific realism is not a requirement, but it'd be nice if there was something that, on the surface, actually seemed plausible

_{[1] Aka. another point of failure, aka. the thing that converts the "off" switch into the "explode now" switch
[2] But at least we got the Eveready electric toothbrush out of it...
[3] Wherein you can fly to the stars... just not for long - Aka. Range Anxiety, but in space!
[4] Forget Premium, you want Positronium Unleaded}

posted about 4 years ago

Samwise‭

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