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A
recurring weapon in Star Trek,
photon torpedoes are capsules enclosing antimatter, which on
detonation is allowed to react with its casing, causing a
matter-antimatter explosion. In the show, the cases of the torpedoes
are made of an alloy known as terminium, presumably able to contact
antimatter without reacting. In reality, this should be impossible,
but antimatter (particularly charged antimatter) may be suspended
using electric and/or magnetic fields without allowing it to contact
its casing. Upon reaching its target, a field may be dropped (for
example, a magnetic field generated by current passing through
coils), allowing the matter and antimatter to react, and detonating
the torpedo.
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A standard Starfleet-issue photon torpedo. SOURCE: Memory-Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki.
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This technology
would be highly unstable, and I would not recommend it for use in
expeditionary starships, due to the fact that, depending on the
amount of antimatter used, a single equipment failure could destroy
several ships.
The name, photon
torpedo, seems relatively unrelated to the matter/antimatter
reaction. A photon is a basic unit of electromagnetic radiation, and
photons are the particles released when matter and antimatter react.
Still, a name more closely related to the reaction might have been
more appropriate.
It is
likely that, when photon torpedoes were first used in the Star
Trek fiction, they were not
intended to use antimatter at all. In fact, an episode of the
original series featured the crew of the Enterprise resorting to the
use of an ounce of antimatter as a weapon when photon torpedoes were
not strong enough. It is unknown what the original design of photon
torpedoes were intended to be. However, the idea of using a
matter/antimatter reaction as a potent weapon would be plausible if
we can find out how to generate, capture, and store antimatter
without it reacting with the particles around it.
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