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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 07 2017, @12:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the top-bottom-up-down-charmed,-I'm-sure dept.

A practically useless form of quark fusion releases more energy than deuterium-tritium fusion:

A pair of physicists discovered a new kind of fusion that occurs between quarks – and they were so concerned with its power they almost didn't publish the results. [...] "I must admit that when I first realised that such a reaction was possible, I was scared," Marek Karliner of Tel Aviv University told Rafi Letzter at Live Science. "But, luckily, it is a one-trick pony."

[...] If we take deuterium (proton plus a neutron) and add energy to squish it against some tritium (proton plus two neutrons), it will scramble to make helium (two protons and two neutrons). That last neutron runs from the scene of the crime. For your effort, you get 17.6 megaelectron volts and an H-bomb.

Karliner and Letzter calculated the fusing of the charm quarks in the recent LHC discovery would release 12 megaelectron volts. Not bad for two itty-bitty particles. But if we were using another pair of heavy quarks? Bottom quarks, for example? That becomes an astonishing 138 megaelectron volts.

[...] Unlike atoms, bottom quarks can't be shoved into a flask and packed into a shell. They exist for something in the order of a picosecond following atomic wrecks inside particle accelerators, before transforming into the much lighter up quark. That leaves quark bombs and quark fusion drives to science fiction authors, and, thankfully, well out of the hands of rogue nations and terrorist cells.

Just what I needed for my pure fusion weapon design.

Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly heavy baryons (DOI: 10.1038/nature24289) (DX)


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2017, @03:42PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2017, @03:42PM (#593677)

    Yeah, bullshit. More like: "when I first realized that such a reaction was possible (but entirely unpractical), I realized that I could jinn up a sensationalized sentence to get me some cheap press."

    Full disclosure: I have done some simulations on black hole and quasar physics that involve energies much greater than this quark fusion, but out of good conscience I will not publish them for fear that new, powerful black hole weapons could be built.

    You're welcome for my magnanimity.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 07 2017, @04:27PM (5 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 07 2017, @04:27PM (#593699) Journal
    My guess is that the author thought there might be a chance that the process could be used to generate a runaway strange matter reaction in the Earth's crust, which would be bad. My view is that an errant cosmic ray would have triggered such a process by now, if it were possible. The Earth has been a sitting target for 4.6 billion years.
    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 07 2017, @06:48PM (4 children)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 07 2017, @06:48PM (#593764) Journal

      That's not clear. Bottom quarks are extremely hard to make, and the cosmic ray that would make a pair of them is so unusual that we probably haven't encountered many of them. And environmental constraints can be as important as the initiating event WRT whether a reaction propagates.

      But it's also true that he must have realized almost immediately how hard it would be to create a mass of bottom quarks, so it's hard to believe that he took the danger seriously for more than a second or two.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 07 2017, @07:02PM (3 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 07 2017, @07:02PM (#593766) Journal

        and the cosmic ray that would make a pair of them is so unusual that we probably haven't encountered many of them

        A bunch of them hit every day with enough energy to produce bottom quark pairs. We even routinely get hit with cosmic rays that have the energy of a thrown baseball.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2017, @11:13PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2017, @11:13PM (#593872)

          Routinely? Maybe if you are a bit generous with what you mean by "routinely".

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @02:13AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @02:13AM (#593920)
          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday November 08 2017, @06:14PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 08 2017, @06:14PM (#594181) Journal

            The Telescope Array aims to help solve that mystery. When a high-energy cosmic array strikes the atmosphere, it disappears in an avalanche of lower energy particles. Those particles trigger the detectors in the array, enabling researchers to deduce the direction and energy of the original cosmic ray. From 2008 to 2013, researchers spotted 72 cosmic rays with energies above 57 exaelectron volts—15 million times the highest energy achieved with a particle accelerator. And 19 of them appear to cluster in a hotspot in the sky about 20° in radius, as Hiroyuki Sagawa, a co-representative for the Telescope Array team from the University of Tokyo, reported today in a press conference at the university.

            The 57 exaelectron volts threshold corresponds roughly to the energy of a baseball thrown at 40 kph. The highest observed energy of such a particle, the "Oh My God" particle [wikipedia.org] was 320 exaelectron volts, a baseball thrown at 94 kph.

            These observations were made at one spot on Earth over a six year period. Now imagine the whole Earth or for that matter the whole Sun combined with 4.6 billion years of such collisions.