Two of the researchers from the Tel Aviv University and the University of Chicago has been successful in finding evidence suggesting that fusing quark can release much more energy than anyone would have ever thought. In their publishing in the journal Nature, Marek Karliner and Jonathan Rosner have described their theories surrounding the amount of energy involved when various types of quarks are fused together.
For learning more about subatomic particles, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider force the atoms to move at quite high speeds and then smash them into one another. Doing such things causes the component parts of the atoms to be disassociated from one another allowing each to be studied. These components that scientists have found, they call them as quarks. The prior researchers have also shown that when the atoms in a collider smash into each other, sometimes that the other pieces come apart and collide with rest of the parts later fusing them into particles called baryons.
The prior study has suggested that energy is involved when the quarks fuse together. In studying the properties of one such fusing, a doubly-charmed baryon, the researchers have found that it took 130 MeV to force the quarks into such a particular configuration, later they also found that fusing the quarks together would also wound up releasing 12 MeV or may be more than that. But performing so, resulted in a net release of approximately 138 MeV, which later was calculated by the team and they found it to be eight times more than the amount of hydrogen released during fusion.
The researchers were quite naturally alarmed at their findings, as the hydrogen fusion lies at the heart of the hydrogen bombs. Succeedingly, they did not consider publishing their results. But the later calculations showed that it would be quite impossible to cause a chain reaction with the help of quarks as they exist too short a period of time that is approximated to one picosecond that is not even long enough for setting a baryon. Thet later decays into less dangerous, much smaller, and lighter quarks.
Moreover, the researchers have agreed that the work is still theoretical, they have not yet tried to use bottom quarks, though they noted it down that it should be technically feasible at the LHC should others find doing so a worthwhile experiment.
Summary:
The abstract of this journal is that the essence of the nuclear fusion is that energy can be released by the rearrangement of nucleons between the initial- and final-state nuclei. So far, the recent discovery of the first doubly charmed baryon Ξ++cc , that contains two charm quarks (c) and one up quark that is (u) and is expected to have a mass of about 3,621 megaelectronvolts (MeV). Later, the mass of the proton is 938 MeV it has also revealed a large binding energy of about 130 MeV in between the two charm quarks. Here we report that this strong binding enables a quark-rearrangement which is an exothermic reaction in which two heavy baryons (Λc) undergo fusion to produce the doubly charmed baryon Ξ++ cc and a neutron n (ΛcΛc →Ξ++cc n ), that results in an energy release of approxmately 12 MeV. This reaction is a quark level analogue of the deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion reaction (DT → 4 He n). The much larger binding energy of approximately 280 MeV in between two bottom quarks (b) causes the analogous reaction with bottom quarks (Λ Λb b→Ξbbn 0 ) to have a much larger energy release of about 138 MeV. We suggest some experimental setups in which the highly exothermic nature of the fusion of two heavy-quark baryons might manifest itself. At present, however, the very short lifetimes of the heavy bottom and charm quarks preclude any practical applications of such reactions. To read more please click here.