While possible, this seems like an even more tenuous argument than usual for theoretical work on phys.org. The original paper is an ocean of maybe’s and if’s, all couched in unsupported models that may well have no bearing on reality. I’m also a little turned off by the term “continent of stability” which sounds like a grandiose rephrasing of the more commonly hypothesized “island of stability” further down the table. That island is very much hypothetical, and the stability referenced is in comparison to other super heavy elements, not matter in general.
New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
#22I couldn't find anything on the expected half-life of udQM in the paper, just how stable are we talking here? The theoretical "island of stability" is only relatively stable (minutes to days) and useless for practical applications.
The article did say that udQM could come in via cosmic rays, this would have to be quite stable over the thousands of years it would take such rays to get to us.
Maybe they meant that cosmic rays colliding with the atmosphere could produce udQM? Cosmic rays are mostly just really energetic protons (just like what you get inside the Large Hadron Collider, but potentially with even more energy) and low mass atomic nuclei (like alpha particles).
Re: New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
#23"If quark matter is found (or produced in accelerators), it may be stored and then fed with slow neutrons or heavy ions. The absorption of these particles means a lower total mass and thus a release of energy, mostly in the form of gamma radiation. Unlike nuclear fusion, this is a process that should be easy to initiate and control." -- Bob Holdom Oh really? Does the paper give any idea about how that might be accomp…
Neutrons are a pain to control as a beam because they have no charge, so methods employing electric or magnetic optics are not applicable. Typical pocket sources use the alpha(9Be,12C)n reaction to produce neutrons; if you have a reactor handy, you can moderate (slow) the neutrons produced and use them... this would be by far the most economical option.
As a nuclear chemistry PhD, I am highly skeptical of the practicality of this as an energy source.
Re: New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
#24Non-mobile link: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-periodic-table.html
Thanks! Updated.
Re: New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
#25"If quark matter is found (or produced in accelerators), it may be stored and then fed with slow neutrons or heavy ions. The absorption of these particles means a lower total mass and thus a release of energy, mostly in the form of gamma radiation. Unlike nuclear fusion, this is a process that should be easy to initiate and control." -- Bob Holdom Oh really? Does the paper give any idea about how that might be accomp…
Exactly. At best, an inefficient energy storage technology. Edit: the difference from fusion (which is a primary energy source) is that in fusion your starting reactants are available. In this case, you'd have to spend lots of energy in a heavy ion collide to create the initial reactants from scratch. Also, this type of matter is experimentally disfavored in the same way as strange matter: if quark matter was stable,…
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Re: New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article did say that udQM could come in via cosmic rays, this would have to be quite stable over the thousands of years it would take such rays to get to us.
Maybe they meant that cosmic rays colliding with the atmosphere could produce udQM? Cosmic rays are mostly just really energetic protons (just like what you get inside the Large Hadron Collider, but potentially with even more energy) and low mass atomic nuclei (like alpha particles).
No, they mean that cosmic rays would be udQM (presumably produced somewhere in the universe and accelerated to us somehow). The premise of the paper is that you need a large number of quarks (for 300+ nucleon system, that's 900+ quarks) to start to enter this udQM regime of stability, and as you say cosmic rays typically have A<40, which is only 120 quarks...
Re: New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
#27"If quark matter is found (or produced in accelerators), it may be stored and then fed with slow neutrons or heavy ions. The absorption of these particles means a lower total mass and thus a release of energy, mostly in the form of gamma radiation. Unlike nuclear fusion, this is a process that should be easy to initiate and control." -- Bob Holdom Oh really? Does the paper give any idea about how that might be accomp…
When particles come together and form a nucleus, it releases energy. This energy is because the new form is more energetically favorable, that is it requires less energy than the particles had separately. This is what makes it stable - it requires input of energy to undo the release of energy. (It doesn't guarantee that some other state is even more stable, like some kind of fission. But going directly back to the fo…
I'm up to speed on the physics behind fusion and fission, what I am missing is this fractional fusion/fission idea with respect to quarks.
The suggestion was (as I understand it) that one could "inject/collide/drop" a neutron onto this matter and the neutron would then fission into it's component quarks, capturing them and releasing the binding energy. So this stable matter is a quark soup held together by the strong force because you've managed to get enough up and down quarks together at a low enough energy?
It isn't a mechanism I'm familiar with and I was interested if there was any experimental results to suggest this stuff would behave the way they hope it would.
Re: New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
#28Very interesting. Would it be correct to say that if true this could lead to an earlier end of the periodic table[0] than had been previously predicted? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_periodic_table#End_of...
Yes, one could phrase it that way... but keep in mind that all these theoretical models suggesting an "end to the table" make huge assumptions that are not well-grounded in experimental results. We don't even know where the neutron dripline is for light systems (Z=12), much less the high end of the table (Z=100+).
The periodic table is only a useful model (and it is very useful) for nuclear systems acting as a zero-temperature Fermi gas (e.g., nuclei here on Earth). At extremes of temperature and pressure (neutron star merger, say), the idea of a discrete periodic table loses meaning.
Re: New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
#29"If quark matter is found (or produced in accelerators), it may be stored and then fed with slow neutrons or heavy ions. The absorption of these particles means a lower total mass and thus a release of energy, mostly in the form of gamma radiation. Unlike nuclear fusion, this is a process that should be easy to initiate and control." -- Bob Holdom Oh really? Does the paper give any idea about how that might be accomp…
Neutrons are a pain to control as a beam because they have no charge, so methods employing electric or magnetic optics are not applicable. Typical pocket sources use the alpha(9Be,12C)n reaction to produce neutrons; if you have a reactor handy, you can moderate (slow) the neutrons produced and use them... this would be by far the most economical option. As a nuclear chemistry PhD, I am highly skeptical of the practic…
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Re: New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article did say that udQM could come in via cosmic rays, this would have to be quite stable over the thousands of years it would take such rays to get to us.
So what is the QM that is found in colliders? “When produced in a collider, quark matter typically decays within a fraction of a second into stable hadronic matter (with bound quarks).” Obviously not udQM, right?
The udQM they're talking about is in a very different regime than the quark matter produced at RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) and other colliders. In those, heavy ions are collided ultrarelativistically (speed just under C) and for a very brief instant, quarks and gluons are liberated from their confinement inside proton and neutrons to become quark-gluon plasma, or QGC. There are up and down quarks just like in normal protons/neutrons, but also other quarks can be created (strange being the most common). At high enough energies and with particular kinematics, you can make all six quark types: see BaBar experiment, LHC, Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) experiments.
In the paper, they're talking about udQM being more stable at zero temperature and pressure, basically "competing" with normal elements. The wiki diagram is useful for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark%E2%80%93gluon_plasma#/me...
