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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: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 08 2017, @12:15AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 08 2017, @12:15AM (#593897) Journal

    You are talking about physical changes, not emotional perspective. Emotional perspective doesn't have those long term swings, people get accustomed to whatever they're experiencing unless it's something "rapidly" changing. It's true that Maslow's hierarchy of needs will dominate *what* they think about, but the emotional tone is really rather separate, and is more adapted to noticing changes in state and/or echoing what their social group considers appropriate. Now if the environment is chronically life threatening then you will tend to get low energy moods, but in such a case you don't get the sort of depression a continual descent would yield unless it's so severe that it can't be continued, in which case you can hardly call it stable.

    Similarly, if you are wealthy and used to being wealthy, you don't even NOTICE that you are wealthy, and it doesn't result in your being predictably happy. Some people will be, especially while they are young and healthy, but others will instead be insecure and unhappy. And such people are often willing to share their unhappiness with others. Again what's going on is people get used to their current experiences, and don't value them, either positively or negatively, but instead react to how their body feels and what their social group expects of them. The one averages out and the other oscillates.

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