#ANTIMATTER FOR SALE PORTABLE#

The Oxford-based company is seemingly the only one in the world that has commercialised the production of Porfyrakis added. 'As for the higher-purity material, we can make 50 milligrams of it, and that would take us weeks to purify,' said Porfyrakis. 'Hopefully, in the next two three years we should be able to achieve this,' said Porfyrakis, who still heads a research group in the university.Īt the moment, Designer Carbon Materials can produce 'up to half a gram a day' of cheaper and lower-purity material, which means that there will be more empty carbon cages than those with a nitrogen atom inside. In 2013, Oxford University together with two partners received a £1.5 million research grant to develop manufacturing methods 'for increasing the production of endohedral fullerenes to the gram scale.' The research of one of the most expensive materials on Earth hasn't been cheap, either. nitrogen atom-based endofullerenes), the 'super power' is a long electron spin lifetime.

These caged molecules have greatly enhanced physical and electronic properties compared to 'normal' ones. In these cages, also known as buckminsterfullerenes, carbon atoms align in a similar way to the vertices of a football, which is where their nickname 'bucky balls' comes from.

#ANTIMATTER FOR SALE PORTABLE#

'If there will be a final product, it should be miniature enough to go into portable devices.' Advertisementįirst discovered in 1985, endohedral fullerenes are created by incarcerating an atom (not necessarily nitrogen) into a cage of 60 carbon atoms. 'It will take them a few years to finalise this research project,' he added. Porfyrakis told Ars Technica in a phone interview that the first batch of the material was sold to a consortium of researchers in the UK and US, including those from Oxford University, who 'work on the production of atomic clocks based on this material.' These tiny atomic clocks, however, won't be around any time soon. Throw an atomic clock into the mix, however, and you can get the accuracy resolution down to around 1mm. With normal GPS navigation offering an accuracy to within a few yards, it could be tricky to properly track and control the vehicles. One of the problems a miniature atomic clock can solve is the positioning of driverless cars. “This is the next revolution for mobile.” “Imagine a minaturised atomic clock that you could carry around in your smartphone,” the company's founder Dr. The material, which essentially is a cage of carbon atoms with a nitrogen atom inside, could be used for very small and very accurate atomic clocks, which are currently of the size of a room. This valuation likely makes the material the second most valuable on Earth, preceded only by antimatter, which is estimated by NASA to cost some £41 trillion per gram. Designer Carbon Materials, an Oxford-based scientific startup, has recently sold its first 200 micrograms of nitrogen atom-based endohedral fullerenes for £22,000 ($33,400)-or about £110 million ($167 million) per gram.

Antimatter for sale