Conductors and circuits for nuclear force

[Steven Hanna]

Is it possible to create something like a circuit powered by the strong nuclear force rather than the electromotive force of a battery? If so, what would be examples of some conductors and resistors that could go in such a circuit?

 

[DaveE]

Not yet. However, perhaps a Nobel Prize awaits you for the creativity the rest of us lack.

 

[.Scott]

Of course, nuclear reactors produce energy based on the release on energy based on the nuclear force. But that energy is immediate converted to thermal energy and eventually electric energy. There are certainly more direct ways of having nuclear reactions directly power electric circuits, but you are asking for "strong nuclear" components and circuitry.

So the particles that carry the strong force are mesons - with half lives of as much as about half a nanosecond. Some have charge and they could be made to follow a circuit. But when they interact with atoms, the interaction will be either electronic (which we exclude as an answer to your question) or directly with the atomic nucleus (any one of the 339 atomic isotopes).

That gets us into some interesting design problems. The most direct way of assembling a "system" of nuclei that might do something useful with mesons (like amplify the meson current or perform a Boolean operation) would be to assemble them in a crystal or other molecule. You would then need to "operate" this circuit without destroying those molecules. So you would need very tame "meson operating energies". Even then, these mesons are going to decay into, among other things, photons - and those photons are going to do a job on those molecules.

So I will take a guess at your question: My guess is that something imaginative could be devised in the way of a very simple meson component - perhaps an exclusive-or gate - probably using only a single atomic nucleus. The conductors would be either a vacuum or enough of a vacuum so as not to interfere with the travel of the meson. The device might very well operate under QM rules - so don't expect exactly a "resistor", but there make be a mechanism to control the velocity of the meson relative to the "component".

 

[Vanadium 50]

Not yet? Probably not ever. The range of the strong force is about a millionth the diameter of an atom. What would you make the wires out of?