The Subatomic Discovery That Physicists Considered Keeping Secret

[Eugene]

Source: SPACE.com via Scientific American

The Subatomic Discovery That Physicists Considered Keeping Secret

Tiny particles called bottom quarks could fuse together in a shockingly powerful reaction

By Rafi Letzter, SPACE.com on November 6, 2017

A pair of physicists announced the discovery of a subatomic event so powerful that the researchers wondered if it was too dangerous to make public.

The explosive event? The duo showed that two tiny particles known as bottom quarks could theoretically fuse together in a powerful flash. The result: a larger subatomic particle, a second, spare particle known as a nucleon, and a whole mess of energy spilling out into the universe. This "quarksplosion" would be an even more powerful subatomic analog of the individual nuclear fusion reactions that take place in the cores of hydrogen bombs.

Quarks are tiny particles that are usually found clinging together to make up the neutrons and protons inside atoms. They come in six versions or "flavors": up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm.

Energetic events at the subatomic level are measured in megaelectronvolts (MeV), and when two bottom quarks fuse, the physicists found, they produce a whopping 138 MeV. That's about eight times more powerful than one of the individual nuclear fusion events that takes place in hydrogen bombs (a full-scale bomb blast consists of billions of these events). H-bombs fuse together tiny hydrogen nuclei known as deuterons and tritons to create helium nuclei, along with the most powerful explosions in the human arsenal. But each of those individual reactions inside the bombs releases only about 18 MeV, according to the Nuclear Weapon Archive, a website devoted to collecting research and data about nuclear weapons. That’s far less than the fusing bottom quarks’ 138 MeV.

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Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-subatomic-discovery-that-physicists-considered-keeping-secret/

[PJMcK]

1. And another box of Pandora's is opened (n/t)

[Fullduplexxx]

2. Oh goody now we can build a planet splitting bomb

[krispos42]

5. Wouldn't make much sense to make two, now would it?

[defacto7]

3. Imagine a 1 gigaton bomb

Last edited Mon Nov 6, 2017, 11:24 PM - Edit history (2)

No... don't.

Ok, I read the article and it clearly states that it is not weapon making material...

"If I thought for a microsecond that this had any military applications, I would not have published it," Karliner said.

Other researches were consulted and they agreed is not possible to make the chain reaction necessary to produce a bomb. Quote: "it's a one trick pony".

A tin hat reaction is much more dangerous than this stuff.

[Sancho]

4. Oh boy...

[longship]

6. Quarks are never found free, outside of a nucleus.

Thanks to asymptotic freedom which won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006.

So, I am not sure how one would be able to assemble a collection of bottom quarks to make any kind of a bang. The rules of the quantum field theory of quantum chromodynamics seem to forbid it.

But that's just my reading of the theory, and I am only a BS in physics.