'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

Oh, Great!

[freeze128]

This means that ubiquitous fusion energy is 50 years away again!

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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: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: 8x more powerful X zero chain reaction = 0

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:8x more powerful X zero chain reaction = 0

[thegreatbob]

Quark Fusion; it shall always be 200 years off from becoming a commercially viable power source.

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.

Sadly...

[Roger W Moore]

...your post is lacking any truth or beauty!

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.

Re:Hooray! Bigger bombs!

[Opportunist]

*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.