'Quark Fusion' Produces Eight Times More Energy Than Nuclear Fusion (futurism.com)

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.

Comments

Don't get too exited

[Dorianny]

This is NOT a usable source of energy. The quarks are so short-lived that a sustained reaction is impossible

Re:Don't get too exited

[slack_justyb]

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:Hooray! Bigger bombs!

[fahrbot-bot]

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.)

Spectacularly confused summary

[tyme]

The fusion isn't a fusion of quarks, but of baryons: two Lambda baryons fuse to form a Chi baryon and a neutron, which is analogous to Deuterium/Tritium nuclear fusion. The bottom form of the Lambda to Chi baryon fusion results in about 11x as much energy released as the charmed form.

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.

Before anyone gets too excited....

[joe_frisch]

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.

Not that surprising.

[Rothron the Wise]

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.