Can Antimatter weapons generate quark-gluon plasma?

[petergreat]

Is the temperature of a hypothetical antimatter bomb explosion sufficiently high to heat the surrounding matter into quark-gluon plasma? I guess not, but just want to ask you guys for sure.

 

[nismaratwork]

Is the temperature of a hypothetical antimatter bomb explosion sufficiently high to heat the surrounding matter into quark-gluon plasma? I guess not, but just want to ask you guys for sure.

Well, I can't speculate about a nonexistent weapon, but the energies of usual positron-electron annihilation is a over a hundred MeV and change less than what you need for the formation of a QGP.

 

[Astronuc]

Is the temperature of a hypothetical antimatter bomb explosion sufficiently high to heat the surrounding matter into quark-gluon plasma? I guess not, but just want to ask you guys for sure.

In short - no.

Proton-antiproton annihilation would yield pions - with a combined total energy = 2 m_pc² = 1.8766 GeV, which is well below the energy for quark separation.

Electron-positron annihilation would yield 0.511 MeV gamma rays.

One will not observe a quark-gluon plasma from ordinary antimatter annihilation.

There is some speculation the quark-gluon plasmas might for under extremely energetic cosmic particles interacting with nuclei in the Earth's atmosphere.

 

[bcrowell]

Proton-antiproton annihilation would yield pions - with a combined total energy = 2 m_pc² = 1.8766 GeV, which is well below the energy for quark separation.

Hmm...Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark-gluon_plasma says a quark-gluon plasma occurs at about 175 MeV per particle (by which I assume they mean 175 MeV/A, not 175 MeV per quark). So it's not immediately obvious to me that 938-MeV pions couldn't do the job, simply based on the energy scales. If a single 938-MeV pion donated all its energy to an alpha particle, the energy per nucleon would be above 175 MeV/A.

However, I suspect that you wouldn't get a QGP this way because the pion would probably just knock a single nucleon out of the target nucleus. You need to thermalize all that energy if you want a QGP.

I also don't know whether the conditions for a QGP are significantly different in light nuclei. I suspect that it's harder to get a QGP in light nuclei, since they use heavy nuclei in relativistic heavy ion physics.

I would also caution the OP about the distinction between (a) creating a QGP in some small number of nuclei, and (b) creating a QGP in bulk matter. I don't think the latter would happen.