'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

Re:Spectacularly confused summary

[Michael Woodhams]

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.

Minor energy problem

[Roger W Moore]

Unfortunately, unlike nuclear fusion where the things you want to fuse can be found lying around because they are stable, exotic baryons containing c or b quarks have to be created. Since their mass is several thousand MeV - even more if you are using baryons with b-quarks - this will require vastly more energy than this fusion will release.

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.