Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Tuesday November 07 2017, @06:14PM (1 child)

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday November 07 2017, @06:14PM (#593753)

    > you'd get a bomb that is almost eight times more powerful than a fusion bomb.

    The people who control thousands of H-bombs have decided that getting anywhere near the top of their potential boom range wasn't very useful. Even if the delivery mechanisms can support multi-megaton warheads, somewhere in the 200k to 1M range seems to be the sweet spot.

    Congratulations, humans! You've gotten so good at killing each other that you don't even need a bigger stick any more.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Touché=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Touché' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday November 20 2017, @01:12AM

    by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 20 2017, @01:12AM (#599086) Journal

    "Congratulations, humans! You've gotten so good at killing each other that you don't even need a bigger stick any more."

    Yes and thank you but we all know that wont stop us. At most there will only be a slight pause until some scientists discover something completely impractical and useless (like summary/article) and then some other scientists discover how to make it practical and useful and then more scientists discover how to scale it up massively :)

    Kind of like the atomic bomb; the Nazis supposedly (according to the winning sides' official version of history) didn't find it practical enough/couldn't make it work, others made it work and used it and people continued to improve upon it first in quantity and then in efficiency until someone more or less optimized it.

    Much bigger sticks in smaller packages would be wonderful for planetary defense, a much bigger bang at long enough range (0.5 astronomical units? ! Au? 2?) should render talk about fragments etc. irrelevant if the explosion is large enough to slow all of it down enough to miss us (we're a constantly moving target after all).

    So chop chop! :P

    --
    Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))