The energy density of antimatter has 9 more zero compared to TNT.
So, roughly speaking, a soda bottle of antimatter is a megaton of TNT[1]. Well, half a soda bottle if you ask the stewardess for a soda of non-antimatter once you get on the plane.
If you want to equal the largest of nuclear warheads tested, you will have to pay a small overage fee on your luggage.
[1] I'm ignoring containment overhead. Once you show me a gram of antimatter we can talk about containment.
There will be a scanner on the airport line that would detect antimatter atoms in quantities of more than a few thousand atoms, which is what you would need to create an explosion.
So the problem is making it safe enough to not explode even if the electric-antimatter converter is shot, crushed, disintegrated in an explosion or superheated.
Bond the anti hydrogen with anti Oxygen, Bond it with an anti-matter noble gas (elements that refuse to react). Maybe there is a creative way to make it hard to unlock into it's explosive state. That way you can only dole out the energy with a complex process that an accident would not recreate.
Antimatter will annihilate when it comes into contact with any normal matter; it's not a chemical reaction. You can't make antimatter 'inert' because it's reactivity doesn't depend upon some chemical property (arrangement of anti-electrons for example), but simply on the fact that it's antimatter. Hence the use of magnetic fields for containment since they prevent contact with ordinary matter.
Your airport scanner would thus have to infer the presence of antimatter rather than detecting it directly (by looking for high-energy photons), but if your containment vessel is leaking then you have bigger problems than law enforcement :-)
No there will not be a scanner because it's impossible to tell the difference from afar.
Scientists would LOVE to find a difference, it would explain so much about the universe.
And no, there is no "creative way to make it hard to unlock into it's [sic] explosive state". Such a thing is impossible. The only thing you can do is make some kind of really good containment.
And BTW a few thousand atoms is not much, even for anti-matter. It's about the energy of a flying mosquito.
> There will be a scanner on the airport line that would detect antimatter atoms in quantities of more than a few thousand atoms, which is what you would need to create an explosion.
If I've got a kilo of antimatter in a briefcase, I'm just going to set it off at the scanner then, killing the ~10k people in the airport... and half the city it's part of.
So, roughly speaking, a soda bottle of antimatter is a megaton of TNT[1]. Well, half a soda bottle if you ask the stewardess for a soda of non-antimatter once you get on the plane.
If you want to equal the largest of nuclear warheads tested, you will have to pay a small overage fee on your luggage.
[1] I'm ignoring containment overhead. Once you show me a gram of antimatter we can talk about containment.