This costly material is known as antimatter, which possesses characteristics of regular substances but opposing electrical charges.
Antimatter is very rare and can only be produced through CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which also explains why it is so valuable.
What Is Antimatter?
Antimatter is made up of basic antiparticles such as antielectrons, antineutrons, etc.
According to theory, the antimatter will explode if it comes into contact with any substances, releasing enormous energy. This happens because the two forces of opposite signs are incompatible with each other.
The Cost of Producing Antimatter
In 2002, CERN for the first time created antihydrogen atoms from antiprotons and positrons in a temperature environment close to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius). At high temperatures, antiatoms will combine with atoms of the environment and disappear immediately.
"One gram of antimatter can cost up to a quadrillion dollars and it takes up to 10 billion years to create enough antimatter for a bomb," said Frank Close, a particle physicist at Oxford University.
"There is only one way to make an antimatter bomb, and that is to find the amount of antimatter that nature has created over the past 15 billion years. Otherwise, at the rate of creating one antimatter atom each time, the amount of energy consumed will be billions of times greater than the energy obtained," experts explained.
In 1999, NASA scientists claimed that it took about $62 trillion to possess just one gram of antimatter.
Although antimatter is an unstable substance, it is an extremely useful material.
If handled carefully, it can become an incredible source of energy that is enough to power interstellar space travel.
Benefits of The Most Expensive Material On The Planet: Antimatter
Fortunately, this dangerous material has not yet been turned into a weapon by any scientific technology.
Currently, antimatter is used in medical imaging devices such as PET (positron emission tomography) scanners to monitor specific functions such as blood flow.
However, using it on a large scale will be extremely expensive because the operating costs of the CERN LHC are also very large.
According to Science To Go estimates, the cost of operating the LHC is about $1 billion per year, and the cost of electricity is an additional $23.5 million per year.
The fact that CERN needs to reach 99.99% of the speed of light to create antimatter, which is enough to light a large city, is also the reason why operating costs become out-of-reach.
