SOMETHING TO QUARK ABOUT!

First I’ll make a statement, then I’ll explain, but hold on to your periodic tables as it’s a doozy!

Fusing heavy quarks can produce 8 times more energy than Nuclear Fusion.

Hmmm. Okay, so remember how Nuclear Fission was all we could do a while back? Remember Three Mile Island and that sort? Then we thought nuclear fusion was the answer. After all, Fusion is what powers our Sun. Take some atoms of Tritium and Deuterium (isotopes of hydrogen, Hydrogen-3 and Hydrogen-2, respectively) bring them together under extreme pressure and temperature to produce a neutron and a helium isotope. And voila; an enormous amount of energy is released, many times the amount produced from fission. Well, move over fusion, and move up quarks.

So what is a quark? You know how everything we know about gets smaller and smaller as we obtain more advanced ways of looking? Heck, quarks were no more than a theory in 1964. Well, Quarks were completely accepted by the 1070’s. They are the most basic building blocks of matter. Where are they? The protons and neutrons that make up matter are composed of quarks. Unlike protons and electrons, which have charges of +1 and -1, however, quarks have fractional electric charge. Quarks that are joined together form composite particles called hadrons. Quarks come in six flavors namely: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm. Fun, right?

And the fusion of Quarks can produce massive amount of energy. It has been shown in a new study that two bottom quarks could theoretically fuse together in a powerful flash that can result in massive amount of energy that can spill out into the universe. The amount of energy? The fusion of two bottom quarks will produce will produce 138 megaelectronvolts (MeV), that’s eight times the amount of energy in an individual nuclear fusion event in a hydrogen bomb.

Now, the next logical question or statement if you think about the human experience is, can they make a bomb from it? I mean that’s where “they” always go.  No. We’re safe, at least from that! A nuclear fusion event occurs only in a reactor (unlike fission a pure fusion does not daisy chain) or a hydrogen bomb as it is a chain reaction in a mass of particles, hence creating a bunch of energy. This is not possible simply by melting heavy quarks, basically because the raw materials cannot be accumulated in the melting process.