Have the scientists published how much antimatter is being produced?
With anti-matter being so exorbitantly expensive to produce, it might even be worthwhile to design a special purpose high-altitude plane with a magnetic scoop to harvest the antimatter!
I did not think that from the title, but after what you've written, I can't help but picture the antimatter as illegal immigrants. I can see the typical reactionary newspaper story now:
'"They took our joules!" One ground-based electron was quoted as saying.'
We've actually known about this for a while. I think BBC is covering the Fermi symposium this week so they are putting out some stories from it. (I work for the Fermi collab.)
Perhaps it's the other way around--electrons and positrons are produced by (some unknown means), they collide, and this is what causes the gamma ray flashes. Isn't that a possibility? I was surprised they didn't explore it in the article.
This is how we know that the initial gamma-ray flash is not caused by positron-electron recombination:
> The dance of light and matter continues when positrons encounter electrons again; they recombine and produce a flash of light of a precise and characteristic colour.
So the spectrum of the initial flash is different from the spectrum of the light produced when the particles recombine. Or so I assume from reading the article. :)
Right. Electron-positron annihilation produces gamma-rays in a line at a very specific energy (E = m_e c^2 = 511 keV), while the typical TGF spectrum is spread over a wide range of energies.
With anti-matter being so exorbitantly expensive to produce, it might even be worthwhile to design a special purpose high-altitude plane with a magnetic scoop to harvest the antimatter!