Making an explosion (in vacuum) is downright hard.Ĭonsider two bricks, one of matter and one of antimatter. An antimatter particle beam is more difficult. It is much easier to extract all the energy from a matter-antimatter reaction if you do it in a slow controlled fashion, say in a power plant or a propulsion system. The trouble is trying to use this as a bomb.
Image from īut in practice it ain't gonna be anywhere near that much. It was named 'photon' because at the time it was believed that an antimatter explosion would be pure gamma-ray photons. Photon Torpedo from original Star Trek (1966).
