Particle Accelerators

Particle accelerators are devices that propel particles at high speeds and energies. They have existed in various forms and for various purposes for many centuries. Those that collide particles may be referred to as particle colliders, which have been in use since several decades before year 0FA to create negative-energy particles. These particles, called negatrons, are used to power warp drives. Negatrons are created by smashing certain particles together, resulting in an output with more energy than the initial state of the matter along with negatrons, which have negative energy and are a converted energon. The sum total energy of the process is conserved.

While at surface glance the process appears to be a source of infinite energy, it cannot be used for this purpose. The normal-matter byproducts of the collision cannot themselves be used in the same process to further increase their energy state; it is a single-tier process. One might instead consider that some fraction of the theoretical total energy of the byproduct could be input back into another reaction of the same type, resulting in a net-gain of energy production (ignoring negative energy). However this too is not possible as the types and states of the energies at the two “ends” of the reactions are not comparably similar such to make this possible. The complex details of this explanation are one of the most complicated branches of particle physics yet developed.

Regardless, the real-world application of the technology essentially completely consumes the input energy, ignoring the output of negatrons. Technology does not currently exist to extract meaningful energy from the byproducts, much the same as most atoms are unusable for human-controlled fusion or fission. The actual particle collision itself produces heat and other forms of radiation, but these are a marginal fraction of the initial input. These factors result in warp drive fuel requiring vast amounts of energy to produce.