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"Antimatter? What?" I asked my daughter.

"Don't you remember? That was a big part of the story -- the bomb in the Vatican," Katy said.

With the pope's expected death on our minds last Friday, Katy, my son Matt and I were talking during lunch about papal succession.

And our conversation had turned to Dan Brown's best-selling book, "Angels & Demons." It's a fictional thriller that deals with a secret society trying to destroy the Roman Catholic Church after the death of a pope.

I needed Katy to jog my memory. I knew that "Angels & Demons" detailed the centuries-old traditions and rituals about the cardinals gathering from around the world, going into a conclave at Vatican City and voting for a new pope.

But Katy also reminded me the book dealt with not only the mystery of religion, but also one of the mysteries of science -- antimatter.

Religion and science

Later that night, as images of the Vatican and the pope filled our TV at home, I got online to remind myself what Dan Brown had written about antimatter.

In terms of subatomic particles, for every component of matter, there's an antimatter component. For example, for protons, there are antiprotons. An electron's antimatter counterpart is a positron.

Audio clips with Brett Esry, Kansas State University physics professor On PET scans On the potential of antimatter as an energy source Audio clips with Philip Baringer, Kansas University professor of physics and astronomy On the technical problems of using antimatter On the potential uses of antimatter Fermilab on antimatter CERN on antimatter Angels & Demons

The collision of matter and antimatter creates almost pure energy.

According to the author's online site at www.danbrown.com, antimatter is no longer just the stuff of science fiction, popularized as the power source for "Star Trek's" starships.

Brown tells us antimatter is regularly created at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), the 50-year-old European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland.

CERN is home of the world's largest particle accelerator laboratory, where antimatter has been created since the late 1990s.

That led me to wonder whether it's really being considered as a potential energy source, or even as -- Brown suggested -- a deadly weapon.

Extreme energy

I called a couple of Kansas physicists who work with antimatter.

The voice on the other end of the phone laughed.

" ‘Angels & Demons' kind of makes CERN sound like something out of a James Bond movie, which was a little bizarre," said Philip Baringer, a Kansas University professor of physics and astronomy.

Baringer's line of research is experimental particle physics, which takes him into the realm of antimatter.

I also called Brett Esry, a professor of physics at Kansas State University. Esry's line of research is theoretical atomic physics. He studies what happens when matter and antimatter collide.

K-State's Esry and KU's Baringer both explained that antimatter is not quite so mysterious.

It's created all the time in particle accelerators at CERN, at the Fermilab (www.fnal.com) outside of Chicago and in other accelerators around the country, they say.

There are two big technical problems with antimatter: It takes a lot of energy to produce, and it's difficult to keep.

As soon as an antimatter particle touches regular matter, both are instantly annihilated.

"If a particle and an antiparticle meet, they will turn into energy," Baringer said. "It's a much more efficient conversion of energy than, say, nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. The whole thing goes into energy, not just some tiny part of it."

Having raised "night and day" twin daughters, I could easily grasp the concept.

PET scans

A type of antimatter is used regularly in medical applications, Esry said.

"If you've heard of Positron Emission Tomography -- PET scans -- those are done with positrons, which are antielectrons," Esry said.

PET Scans are used regularly in hospitals to detect cancer. A radioactive substance is injected into a patient. And positrons emitted from radioactive decay are used to create images that show what's inside the body.

However, to get the more substantive antimatter particles -- antiprotons -- you need a particle accelerator and a lot of energy, they said.

To the stars

Because of the volatile nature of antimatter, special canisters have to be created to store antiprotons to hold them magnetically in place in a vacuum, Esry said.

"Angels and Demons" turns into science fiction, Baringer said, in how much antimatter now is being created and stored.

If you could turn all of the antimatter being created at the Fermilab into energy, you might get a tiny amount of power, he said.

Maybe 200 watts.

"You would be able to light a couple of light bulbs with that," he said.

To have any real potential, you would have to manufacture it in much larger quantities, they said. And that's just not happening yet, Esry said.

"If you could take all the antimatter that they build, that they make at CERN, which is probably one of the biggest producers of antimatter, and just let it loose in the room to react, you probably wouldn't even notice it because it would be such a small amount of energy," the K-State professor said.

Esry said that besides pure research and medical imaging, there wasn't much use for antimatter.

Yet.

"About the only place I can really imagine antimatter really being a useful energy source, is ... ‘Star Trek' applications," the K-State professor said. "If you could make enough of it here on the ground, where you can make it, then bottle it and put it in a spaceship where a lot of energy in small mass is important, then it might pay off. Then it might be worthwhile. But that's still a long way away."

Vast potential

Both physicists say there's certainly not enough antimatter made to create a major explosion, although it wouldn't take much.

According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle last fall, the Air Force is looking into antimatter as a weapon source.

The newspaper reported it would only take a tiny speck of antimatter -- some 50 millionths of a gram -- to make a blast equal to the 1995 explosion at the federal building in Oklahoma City.

KU's Baringer said the book "Angels & Demons" tended to go a bit overboard on what physicists actually can produce.

"I wouldn't be worried about people putting together an antimatter bomb at this point," he said.

I went back to watching CNN's coverage of the activity in the Vatican, somehow reassured.