Theoretical quark fusion found to be more powerful than hydrogen fusion
phys.org
phys.org
This must be either some kind of inside joke that was lost on the reporter, or a really poor reporting. You simply cannot accumulate stuff that decays in the order of picoseconds: if you can, you already have a bomb. No chain reaction needed.
After all, when they say "they decay into much smaller, less dangerous lighter quarks," it means they release all this dangerous energy.
It's like saying "Fortunately, this TNT decays into a much less dangerous mixture of inert nitrogen, water vapor, and carbon monoxide." Well, duh, it's exactly the process of decaying that makes TNT so dangerous.
First is the rate at which you can generate the precursors. How many can you generate in a picosecond? That's how big your explosion can be. Or rather, the explosion will be as big as how many you can generate in a picosecond, times however many picoseconds you can sustain generating them (plus the force needed to make the fusion reaction happen).
The second problem is that generating the ingredients probably takes at least as much energy as you get out of the fusion reaction. At that point, whatever you're using to generate the energy can be your weapon, without needing the intermediate step of the quark fusion reaction. (As the Schlock Mercenary web comic says, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a really big gun.")
But for fusion, there is no critical mass as the ingredients (from a nuclear standpoint) are inert. So it's a matter of keeping them present and around long enough that it can be weaponized.
Early hydrogen bombs had this problem as they used cryogenic fuel. There was a real challenge of keeping the fuel from boiling off and having nothing to fuse.
Of course, that problem was solved. Not to suggest the challenge to keep a quark around for longer will prove to be as simple, but give it some decades...and things will be interesting.
Which is why all of the large ones have been decomissioned.
Ironically, eliminating "bigger" bombs in favor of smaller ones is being cited as a danger in and of itself. Because the threshold to using nuclear weapons currently is so high (even in the 170-300kt range as they are now), pursing accurate weapons in the tens of kilotons range is seen as destabilizing because it's seen as being more acceptable to use against say, a remote, hardened target.
Say you have 2 10meV particles that can fuse into a single 12meV particle this means that 8meV of energy has to be released in the process.
If they also have a decay route that say decays into a 9meV particle it means that only 2meV are released in the decay process.
If we take a real world example then hydrogen fusion releases about 14.5meV of excess energy on top of the helium atom when 2H and 3H fuse, deuterium (2H) is stable, tritium (3H) is not and it’s beta decay only releases 0.0018meV of energy.
This means that the energy released in a fusion reaction is about 8000 more than the beta decay of the tritium.
The product of the decay/fusion is also important the beta decay of tritium releases an electron and a neutrino the energy that goes into the neutrino is effectively sunk since it’s a weakly interactive particle which is basically harmless.
The electron is what you need to worry about in this case.
Does anyone proof read anymore?
I mean, this really solves all the questions about whether or not consciousness is an inherent property of the universe, if quarks themselves are already at a level that they can communicate their name to scientists. Profound stuff.
Let's, as they say, eat grandma: https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/se...
For anyone that's not seen Look Around You, all the episodes are on youtube. Season 1 is the one to start with, there's two seasons and they're very different.
Some of this won't translate as well, the episodes are absurdist versions of shows that used to be on BBC2 very early in the morning. There would be a show as some science lesson, put on at 2am for people to tape and show in classes. I'm sure it's a pretty wide age range but I'm 30 and seeing slightly warped tapes playing this kind of thing was pretty common for me. Still, even without this I think they're pretty fun.
There's also the pilot for calcium on youtube but there's the other episodes here:
"Prior work has suggested that energy is involved when quarks fuse together. In studying the properties of one such fusing, a doubly-charmed baryon, the researchers found that it took 130 MeV to force the quarks into such a particular configuration, but they also found that fusing the quarks together wound up releasing 12 MeV more than that. Intrigued by their finding, they quickly focused on bottom quarks, which are much heavier—calculations showed it took 230 MeV to fuse such quarks, but doing so resulted in a net release of approximately 138 MeV, which the team calculated was approximately eight times more than the amount released during hydrogen fusion.
Since hydrogen fusion lies at the heart of hydrogen bombs, the researchers were quite naturally alarmed at their findings. So much so that they considered not publishing their results. But subsequent calculations showed that it would be impossible to cause a chain reaction with quarks because they exist for too short a period of time—approximately one picosecond—not long enough to set off another baryon. They decay into much smaller, less dangerous lighter quarks."
Suppression of results introduces subjectivity and allows for injection of agenda into what should be an objective practice. Not to mention, someone else will likely make the discovery eventually; would you rather suppress your findings and allow say, North Korea to be the first to develop a dangerous technology without any study into countermeasures?
Add this kind of bad practice to the other contemporary problems in research (replicability crisis, p value misuse, etc) and it feels like the modern scientific establishment is regressing.
Traditionally where there are clear military uses that one doesn't want to make available to an enemy.
> would you rather suppress your findings and allow say, North Korea to be the first to develop a dangerous technology
They didn't say they wouldn't share it with anyone, they said they were thinking about not publishing it.
> it feels like the modern scientific establishment is regressing
This isn't new by any means. For example, the development of fission had similar concerns and restrictions nearly a century ago.
since they are technically inverse its important to clarify IMO.
I found this the most interesting part of the article. I wonder what, if any, groundbreaking research has been hidden by its discoverers due to its potential for misuse.
I suppose there are other examples of this kind of fusion too- electron capture by a proton producing a neutron, for example.
So when a neutron decays into a proton and an electron, it doesn't mean that the neutron consists of a proton and an electron; merely that the "neutron field" has a coupling with a "proton field" and an "electron field".
So particles can indeed turn into other particles, as long as certain conservation laws are obeyed.
[Edit: typo]
Also, they aren't individual quarks "combining" into something else, it is an interaction between baryons which are groups of quarks and the "output" has an exchange of quarks between the baryons. Quarks can't be "free" at most energy scales due to color confinement.
Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly-heavy baryons
> At present, however, the very short lifetimes of the heavy bottom and charm quarks preclude any practical applications of such reactions.
In other words, this is just an academic exercise, albeit an interesting one.
Is there anything to suggest that quark fusion would make any of these problems easier, or is this too early a stage for anyone to know that yet?
It's actually fusion they're talking about here, not fission.
> rather containing it ...
You're referring to using fusion as an energy source. Here they're just talking about the energy liberated in individual collisions not in sustainable reactions.
> suggest that quark fusion would make any of these problems easier
The exact opposite. The article points out that there's no real chance of a chain reaction so you couldn't even produce a bomb never mind a sustainable energy source.