E=MC2 - Efficiency

Efficiency

Although mass cannot be converted to energy, matter particles can be. Also, a certain amount of the ill-defined "matter" in ordinary objects can be converted to active energy (light and heat), even though no identifiable real particles are destroyed. Such conversions happen in nuclear weapons, in which the protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei lose a small fraction of their average mass, but this mass-loss is not due to the destruction of any protons or neutrons (or even, in general, lighter particles like electrons). Also the mass is not destroyed, but simply removed from the system in the form of heat and light from the reaction.

In nuclear reactions, typically only a small fraction of the total mass–energy of the bomb is converted into heat, light, radiation and motion, which are "active" forms which can be used. When an atom fissions, it loses only about 0.1% of its mass (which escapes from the system and does not disappear), and in a bomb or reactor not all the atoms can fission. In a fission based atomic bomb, the efficiency is only 40%, so only 40% of the fissionable atoms actually fission, and only 0.04% of the total mass appears as energy in the end. In nuclear fusion, more of the mass is released as usable energy, roughly 0.3%. But in a fusion bomb (see nuclear weapon yield), the bomb mass is partly casing and non-reacting components, so that in practicality, no more than about 0.03% of the total mass of the entire weapon is released as usable energy (which, again, retains the "missing" mass).

In theory, it should be possible to convert all of the mass in matter into heat and light (which would of course have the same mass), but none of the theoretically known methods are practical. One way to convert all matter into usable energy is to annihilate matter with antimatter. But antimatter is rare in our universe, and must be made first. Due to inefficient mechanisms of production, making antimatter always requires far more energy than would be released when it was annihilated.

Since most of the mass of ordinary objects resides in protons and neutrons, in order to convert all ordinary matter to useful energy, the protons and neutrons must be converted to lighter particles. In the standard model of particle physics, the number of protons plus neutrons is nearly exactly conserved. Still, Gerard 't Hooft showed that there is a process which will convert protons and neutrons to antielectrons and neutrinos. This is the weak SU(2) instanton proposed by Belavin Polyakov Schwarz and Tyupkin. This process, can in principle convert all the mass of matter into neutrinos and usable energy, but it is normally extraordinarily slow. Later it became clear that this process will happen at a fast rate at very high temperatures, since then instanton-like configurations will be copiously produced from thermal fluctuations. The temperature required is so high that it would only have been reached shortly after the big bang.

Many extensions of the standard model contain magnetic monopoles, and in some models of grand unification, these monopoles catalyze proton decay, a process known as the Callan–Rubakov effect. This process would be an efficient mass–energy conversion at ordinary temperatures, but it requires making monopoles and anti-monopoles first. The energy required to produce monopoles is believed to be enormous, but magnetic charge is conserved, so that the lightest monopole is stable. All these properties are deduced in theoretical models—magnetic monopoles have never been observed, nor have they been produced in any experiment so far.

A third known method of total matter–energy conversion is using gravity, specifically black holes. Stephen Hawking theorized that black holes radiate thermally with no regard to how they are formed. So it is theoretically possible to throw matter into a black hole and use the emitted heat to generate power. According to the theory of Hawking radiation, however, the black hole used will radiate at a higher rate the smaller it is, producing usable powers at only small black hole masses, where usable may for example be something greater than the local background radiation. It is also worth noting that the ambient irradiated power would change with the mass of the black hole, increasing as the mass of the black hole decreases, or decreasing as the mass increases, at a rate where power is proportional to the inverse square of the mass. In a "practical" scenario, mass and energy could be dumped into the black hole to regulate this growth, or keep its size, and thus power output, near constant. This could result from the fact that mass and energy are lost from the hole with its thermal radiation.