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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: 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.

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