Tertiary Source

What's the antimatter content of a banana?

2008-10-21 11:06:37

Antimatter is strange, exotic stuff, right? Only produced in dangerous physics experiments? Leads to complete annihilation with ordinary matter?

Sort of. It's a question of quantity.

Consider the element potassium. Potassium, like sodium, is an alkali metal; potassium ions in solution play an important role in several different biochemical processes. You have to eat potassium or you'll die, but this is true for lots of different plants and animals, so potassium deficiencies aren't common in well-fed people. Natural potassium is made of three different isotopes. About 117 parts per million natural potassium is potassium-40, 40K, which is unstable with a lifetime 1.25 billion years. This radioactive potassium is left over from the formation of the solar system; in the 4.5 billion years since the earth coalesced, 97% of the the original 40K has decayed.

A "medium" banana (whatever that means) has about half a gram of potassium, or 7.7×1021 atoms. Of these, 9.0×1017 (about sixy micrograms) are 40K. If you picked just one of these nuclei, you'd have to wait a billion years (on average) to see it decay; in our banana we have lots of atoms we can watch all at once, so there will be about 23 decays per second. Of these decays, 89% are β- decays to calcium, and 11% are electron capture decays to argon. Only one decay in 105 actually emits an antielectron. So an ordinary banana contains an antielectron for a brief instant about once every 75 minutes.

Of course, all the β- and electron capture decays are accompanied by an electron antineutrino, which leaves the banana at the speed of light. Which is a bigger contribution to the antimatter number density in a banana: an antielectron that stops and annihilates, or an antineutrino that instantly escapes?

Comment on What's the antimatter content of a banana?
Name:
Email:
URL:
(I promise not to do anything unsavory with your contact information.)
You can also send regular email.

Recent questions

[none]

Older questions

The Greenland and Antarctic landmasses are under a mile of ice. Supposedly if this weight were removed the landmasses would "rebound" out of the mantle. How high would they go?
2009-02-27 Friday 23:30:51
To an outside observer, an object dropped onto a black hole never actually crosses the horizon; it approaches the horizon asymptotically and light from it becomes more and more redshifted. Suppose I drop a room-temperature blackbody in a hole. How long does it take before the redshifted temperature is colder than the Hawking temperature of the horizon?
2009-02-27 Friday 23:24:26
Sensitivity to market fluctuations: a disadvantage to overly progressive taxes?
2009-02-25 Wednesday 20:31:21
A metric for cheap eating: calories per dollar?
2009-01-27 Tuesday 11:48:35
Yesterday's solstice was the day when the northern hemisphere gets less solar irradiance than any other. In most countries this is "midwinter," but in the United States it's "the first day of winter." When did this label change?
2008-12-22 Monday 06:58:50
A jugful of water adds some thermal inertia and makes an empty refrigerator cool more efficiently. A tubful of water ought to do the same thing for drafty old house. How big is the effect?
2008-12-08 Monday 09:59:41
My fan-driven humidifier makes my house feel colder. How much heat does it pull to vaporize the water it does?
2008-11-14 Friday 16:59:35
Suppose I replace an incandescent light bulb with a more expensive, more energy-efficient, longer-lived light — a CFL, an LED, whatever — based on the expectation that it'll cost less over its life. How old does my incandescent bulb have to be before I actually save anything?
2008-10-28 Tuesday 21:42:08
If Hawking's connection between black holes and thermodynamics is right, astrophysical black holes --- for which general relativity predicts everything bizarre happens well inside the horizon, and for which there are observational evidence --- are at the zero-temperature limit. What's the "warmest" black hole for which there is observational evidence? What's the transition "temperature" where quantum gravity starts to matter?
2008-10-06 Monday 19:45:48
An observation by Consumer Reports, that breakfast cereals marketed to children aren't terribly nutritious, has gotten some evening-news press. The main contribution of the Consumer Reports release seems to be that they bought a bunch of cereal and read the nutrition labels. What's new here? Has the composition of existing products been tweaked? Have some sweeter brands been introduced to replace healthier ones? How do these sorts of news blobs correlate with sales, or with marketing spending?
2008-10-06 Monday 12:29:26