'Quark Fusion' Produces Eight Times More Energy Than Nuclear Fusion (futurism.com) 173
walterbyrd shares a report from Futurism: This new source of energy, according to researchers Marek Karliner and Jonathan Rosner, comes from the fusion of subatomic particles known as quarks. These particles are usually produced as a result of colliding atoms that move at high speeds within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where these component parts split from their parent atoms. It doesn't stop there, however, as these disassociated quarks also tend to collide with one another and fuse into particles called baryons. It is this fusion of quarks that Karliner and Rosner focused on, as they found that this fusion is capable of producing energy even greater than what's produced in hydrogen fusion. In particular, they studied how fused quarks configure into what's called a doubly-charmed baryon. Fusing quarks require 130 MeV to become doubly-charmed baryons, which, in turn, releases energy that's 12 MeV more energy. Turning their calculations to heavier bottom quarks, which need 230 MeV to fuse, they found that a resulting baryon could produce approximately 138 MeV of net energy -- about eight times more than what hydrogen fusion releases. The new study has been published in the journal Nature.
8x more powerful X zero chain reaction = 0 (Score:1)
The ability to generate sufficient quarks for such a thing to be sustaining is decades to centuries off but it's nice to know how it works.
Re: 8x more powerful X zero chain reaction = 0 (Score:3, Funny)
We have to get more people buying these large hadron colliders! When the price goes down everyone will get one put in their backyard and we will all be rolling in the quarks.
Re: 8x more powerful X zero chain reaction = 0 (Score:5, Funny)
If I'm going to be rolling in the Quarks, will I be a Top or a Bottom? I'm already considered a bit Strange, and without any Charm. But those are the Ups and Downs of walking around with a Hadron all the time.
Re: (Score:1)
No mod points, but this is +1 Funny.
Wrong Quark (Score:2)
You'll actually be a Ferengi
Re: (Score:3)
At least he'll have a bar.
All I got is this freakin' moon.
Re: (Score:2)
Wilhuff, will you EVER be happy?
Re: (Score:2)
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/... [wikia.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I hold your Star Trek reference and raise you a Star Wars reference [wikia.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Oh yeah, because "Quark [wikia.com]" is from Star Wars.
Re: (Score:2)
No, but the "just a moon"... forget it, jokes don't get better when you start explaining them.
Sadly... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
You need to kill yourself. Please swallow some boiling lead.
Re: (Score:3)
Found the strange one.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
How dare you question the mantra of endless progress! We have millions of times more computing power than in the 1960s! Just look at how everything else progressed!
We live in the same houses, drive on the same roads, with cars that go the same speed driving on the same tires, while airplanes fly at the same height and speed burning the same fuel!
See? Endless progress! This means the glorious 3D printed private-space asteroid-mined quark-fused warp drive is JUST AROUND THE CORNER!
Look at how many cores my la
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem for a lot of these is a lack of clean, safe and cheap energy.
We got dependent of fossil fuels which are dirty, mostly safe and currently cheap.
This in general limited our progress in transportation because any faster or less fuel efficient the dirty part of the fuel will have more of a cost then a benefit. We are already paying for the cost now except for a few idiots who want to ignore the problem of the world.
Re:8x more powerful X zero chain reaction = 0 (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
100MT should be enough for anyone.
Re: (Score:3)
Whomever downmodded you is a fucking idiot that has never heard of Tsar Bomba.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Trump and Kim will love that.
Well... From TFA:
However, their fears that this quark fusion could be weaponized soon fizzled out as they realized in subsequent experiments that quarks exist only for about one picosecond. That’s too short a time to create a chain reaction to set off more baryons, as the quarks quickly decay into less volatile, lighter quarks.
(In short, they decay faster than Trump's attention span.)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
(In short, they decay faster than Trump's attention span.)
Nope, Scientific tests have proven that nothing decays faster than Trump's attention span. However, it seems like a Twitter containment field can prevent such decay
Re:Hooray! Bigger bombs! (Score:5, Funny)
*sigh*
Fuck, when will people ever get it right. The Twitter Containment Field (or TCF) only creates a snapshot, it does not conserve a state. And even though to the untrained eye the TCF seems to conserve a state, its attention half life is even shorter than what is contained therein, making it even less important than what it contains.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
When do I get my flying Delorean? (Score:2)
This should be enough power, right?
Re: (Score:2)
138 MeV is only about 2*10^-11 joules of energy.
For comparison, a typical AA battery has about 13,000 joules of energy when bought off the shelf.
Re: (Score:3)
Correct the single reaction is only 138 MeV. The whole point is that a single gram of material provides 6.02*10^23 reactions. That's 1.186 * 10^13 joules. 6.3 * 10^13 is roughly the energy in the Hiroshima bomb. However, I can be wrong about that, that's some serious back of the napkin math on a process I haven't really read up on, but it is Avogadro's number for the molar mass of a gram of hydrogen. Point being, while a single reaction is very weak, a single gram of material provides a massive amount
Oh, Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
This means that ubiquitous fusion energy is 50 years away again!
Even better yet, we'll have 8 times as much fusion energy in 50 years!
Re: (Score:2)
I'm using fusion power right now. It powers my car!
No need to build more, the one we have is sufficient.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Quarks, along with electrons, are believed fundamental at the moment, as they cannot be split or even collided, so are either tiny beyond statistical belief, or are true point particles.
Anyway, quarks form together to make protons and neutrons and stuff, and protons and neutrons together make the nucleus of an atom. It turns out jamming quarks together to make protons and neutrons gives off 8x more energy than jamming neutrons and protons together to make the nucleus of an atom.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but we've got lots of hydrogen around, and if we fuse that into heavier elements we create power. All the quarks I can see here at my desk are pretty firmly bound, and we'd have to unbind them to fuse them. According to TFS, scientists bashed atoms together in the LHC and got a few quarks to swap around. That doesn't sound like an energy source (from TFS).
Minor energy problem (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, just the decay of these baryons releases far more energy that this fusion process so it's not the short lifetime that prevents practical application it's making the constituents in the first place and, even if you find someway to do that, you are better off just waiting for them to decay.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, it's a significant contribution to how subatomic physics works. The proper question is whether whoever wrote TFS was that stupid or just looking for some attention?
Don't get too exited (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
That just means we need to incorporate time manipulation into the reaction.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
But it is eight times as zero!
Re: (Score:2)
How old was Quark? He didn't seem short-lived to me.
Re: Don't get too exited (Score:5, Funny)
Of course Quark fusion is unacceptably unstable. While not quite as good, there is an alternative which is much more stable. Ladies and gentlemen, get ready for...
PageMaker Fusion!
Re: (Score:2)
Of course Quark fusion is unacceptably unstable.
I am now imagining Quark and the Grand Nagus doing that little dance, side by side, pointing their fingers in the air, leaning towards each other and shouting "Fu... sion.. HAA!"
I'm not apologising.
Re: (Score:1)
They also said that nobody would adopt horses on steam powered pogo sticks as a method of transportation.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Don't get too exited (Score:4, Insightful)
This is NOT a usable source of energy.
More importantly, the energy required to create the baryons in the first place is 1-2 orders of magnitude more than the fusion releases and you get more energy just waiting for them to decay.
Re:Don't get too exited (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly this! The whole reason nuclear fusion works is because we're tapping into the energy in a neutron. A star's massive size creates a sizable amount of gravitational energy. A small amount of this gravitational energy is used to transition a proton into a neutron via the weak force. This creates deuterium. That eventually flies away from a star and carries off the energy or stays put and gains more energy by converting into helium. In nuclear fusion, we bring two deuterium atoms and form either tritium or Helium-3. The process of doing so releases some of that energy that was used to originally bind the proton and neutron. Fusion isn't creating energy from nothing, it came from somewhere to begin with. It's just that we've got so many isotopes of hydrogen, helium, and lithium on this planet, that using them as a fuel is cheap. We don't have some magic well for doubly charmed or bottom quarks.
Re: (Score:1)
Spectacularly confused summary (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone who knows anything about subatomic physics would know that you can't have fusion of individual quarks because quarks never occur individually outside of a baryon, so the summary is simply incoherent nonsense.
Re: (Score:2)
Where are my mod points when I need them?
Thank you for the concise and accurate summary. The only isolated quark is a dairy product [wikipedia.org].
Re:Spectacularly confused summary (Score:4, Interesting)
So if I happen to have a couple of charm or bottom Lambda bosons, I can do something clever to collide them and I can get energy. Alternatively, I could just wait about 10^-12 seconds until they decay of their own accord, and I can get energy.
It got past the Nature reviewers, so I suppose there must be some point, but I'm not seeing it.
Re: (Score:1)
It got past the Nature reviewers, so I suppose there must be some point, but I'm not seeing it.
I assume the researchers and the Nature reviewers - being, unlike Slashdot submitters and editors, in possession of at least two brain cells each - were not treating it as a miraculous power source. Rather, they were publishing a description of the way certain exotic particles interact with one another, confirming or refuting the way theory says they should, like thousands of other papers examining the intricacies of particle physics.
Re: (Score:3)
I could just wait about 10^-12 seconds until they decay of their own accord
What do you plan to do during all that time?
Re: (Score:3)
Okay, but (Score:2, Offtopic)
What about Rom Fusion?
If only we had a pile of loose quarks (Score:3)
This is in line with rules of acquisition. (Score:2)
Eight times more? This is in line with rules of acquisition.
buying quarks (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The Mouse That Roared (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm...
Maybe that movie was prophetic and they'll produce a Q-bomb, with more power than all the A-bombs and H-bombs of the world combined...
A.
Re: (Score:1)
They were hesitant about publishing this because of the threat of making a Q-Bomb out of it, but they said that the Baryon's didn't last long enough to create a chain reaction.
But I'm sure someone will figure out how to make them last longer also.
Re: (Score:2)
They were hesitant about publishing this because of the threat of making a Q-Bomb out of it, but they said that the Baryon's didn't last long enough to create a chain reaction.
But I'm sure someone will figure out how to make them last longer also.
That's simple; Accelerate all the baryons you plan to fuse to a significant fraction of C large enough to produce sufficient time-dilation effects.
Of course, to achieve that kind of velocity you'll need large scale quark-fusion levels of energy.
Strat
Re: (Score:1)
That's simple; Accelerate all the baryons you plan to fuse to a significant fraction of C large enough to produce sufficient time-dilation effects.
I'm curious about this possibility. To my understanding, velocities of non-C particles are always in context (ie, relative) to an observer. Thus you don't need to accelerate the baryons at all, they're already traveling close to the speed of light relative to some other speedy observer -- who may or may not exist.
This "velocity gap" is sometimes useful in use-cases like detecting high-speed short-lived muons falling through the atmosphere, when they would ordinarily decay long before hitting the ground had
Re: (Score:2)
To my understanding, velocities of non-C particles are always in context (ie, relative) to an observer. Thus you don't need to accelerate the baryons at all, they're already traveling close to the speed of light relative to some other speedy observer -- who may or may not exist.
That would necessarily be in relation to the particle's space-time fabric within which it and the 'observer(s)' exist. Everything and everyone outside of that space-time fabric 'bubble' around the particles created by relativistic ef
Re: (Score:2)
Wow...Slashdot completely lost my hypertext quotes.
Or maybe they simply entered a different space-time 'bubble'.
Probably chilling with my MIA unmatched socks.
Strat
Re: (Score:1)
I think someone with an original 6-digit UID likely has it pretty-well down by now. Slashcode has eaten my quote tags (among other weird things) a time or two over the years as well. However, hands-down the most common thing for Slashdot to devour is one's hope for mankind and personal will to live.
Cost of 'Quark Fusion'? (Score:1)
I wonder what the current Gold Pressed Latinum exchange rate is?
releases energy that's 12 MeV more energy (Score:1)
Why not instead of wording it so utterly retardedly go with something like:
releases bigness that's 12 MeV more bigger
Before anyone gets too excited.... (Score:5, Informative)
This is very interesting from a theoretical / experimental point of view. Its an analog of nuclear fusion but done with quarks. That is fun and interesting and well worth a nature paper. It is NOT however in any way a possible source of energy. The quarks in normal matter are already in their lowest energy state. The lambda_c particles they are fusing have a half life of a fraction of a picosecond - not something you might find lying around. Making lambdas would take far more energy than comes out of the "fusion".
So its an interesting example of a large binding energy between charmed quarks, but since you have to create the input particles out of energy, its not a path to net energy production. The abstract of the paper says as much.
Quark? There is more energy in Grana Padano (Score:2)
Is this the Solarmanite? (Score:2)
Quark already is my daily energy source, ... (Score:2)
Ref.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(dairy_product)/ [wikipedia.org]
Irradiated foods, on the other side, tend to wear me out, so the headline seems about correct.
Hydrogen is abundant in the universe ... (Score:3)
Not that surprising. (Score:3, Informative)
It's using the strong nuclear force rather than the weak one, but as long as you don't have a free supply of free quarks (you don't) it's not really a power source. Don't expect to see quark fusion reactors at any time in the future, sure you can make them in the LHC, but only by using vastly more energy than you'll get fusing the quarks back together again.
Re: (Score:2)
It's using the strong nuclear force rather than the weak one, but as long as you don't have a free supply of free quarks (you don't) it's not really a power source.
Batteries are not a "power source" and yet we find them quite useful. Perhaps this discovery could lead to a battery that you can keep in your pocket and power your jetpack, personal AI super computers, and such for a lifetime? Sure, it may take an entire star worth of energy to charge that battery, but it could be useful...
I guess that means... (Score:2)
...that soon we'll hear that Iran and DPRK have both independently begun development of 'quark bombs'.
Cool. Now how practical is it? (Score:2)
Whoops! Used the P-word! Sorry! Sorry!
Still. Is this process any more manageable, efficient or economical than nuclear fusion?
Re: (Score:1)
University of Utah demonstrated cold fusion in 1989, but notice that the Republicans haven't allowed us to have it yet.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And to a picnic every labor day.
Re: Democrat wins VA governorship (Score:1)
I know the parent post is there to just get a pointless raise out of everyone and release some pent up stress the poster has, but for the foreigners who also may not know the history of the US (what the poster is really referring to).
The US geographical part of the Americas in its 500 years of recognized history has NEVER been anything the parent implies. In many aspects it was the exact opposite. The US has been the most prosperous nation since the early 1800s (overtaking Britain I think) and has pretty m
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)