Is the Melting Quarks Experiment a Scam?

[bbbl67]

Okay, I've been seeing the following story circulating around various websites. I get the feeling that it's a scam, but I don't want to prejudge it. So I thought I'd ask the various experts about what they think of it.

http://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/Melting-quarks-can-produce-10-times-times-the-energy-of-nuclear-fusion-513400

Now, there are various reasons I think there's something wrong here, but I'm not sure if it's as a result of the science itself, or if it's as a result of a poorly written article, or both? In one paragraph, they wrote:

Physicists have wondered whether fusion is also possible from the smaller particles called quarks. A few months ago, experimental physicists at the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva discovered a new type of particle called a baryon, which contains two heavy quarks of the kind called a “charm” and a “light quark.”

Now, obviously there is no way that a baryon is a "new" particle, we've known about baryons for decades, as they are just the protons and neutrons. I'm thinking that this is just poor reporting, from a reporter who doesn't understand particle physics. At least I sure hope the scientists involved in this study didn't claim to have discovered a baryon.

Also, a baryon made with some charm quarks is obviously going to have higher energy than a baryon made with standard up/down quarks, but that's obvious based on their masses. But even regular fusion involves quarks reacting. So this term "melting quarks" sounds very marketing-driven, which I another reason I am skeptical about this.

And finally, in another article about this story, they quoted one of the scientists as saying that they nearly buried this research, and that they feared it might be a "planet killer" bomb. But later they said this research has little to no practical applications! It all sounds like a big joke.

'Breakthrough' in nuclear fusion produced by melting quarks

 

[fresh_42]

Published here (pay wall): https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v551/n7678/full/nature24289.html

Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly heavy baryons
Marek Karliner & Jonathan L. Rosner

Nature, 551, 89–91 (02 November 2017) doi:10.1038/nature24289
Received 16 August 2017 Accepted 18 September 2017 Published online 01 November 2017

The essence of nuclear fusion is that energy can be released by the rearrangement of nucleons between the initial- and final-state nuclei. The recent discovery1 of the first doubly charmed baryon

, which contains two charm quarks (c) and one up quark (u) and has a mass of about 3,621 megaelectronvolts (MeV) (the mass of the proton is 938 MeV) also revealed a large binding energy of about 130 MeV between the two charm quarks. Here we report that this strong binding enables a quark-rearrangement, exothermic reaction in which two heavy baryons (Λc) undergo fusion to produce the doubly charmed baryon

and a neutron n (

), resulting in an energy release of 12 MeV. This reaction is a quark-level analogue of the deuterium–tritium nuclear fusion reaction (##DT → {}^4He\, n##). The much larger binding energy (approximately 280 MeV) between two bottom quarks (b) causes the analogous reaction with bottom quarks (

) 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.

 

[bbbl67]

Published here (pay wall): https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v551/n7678/full/nature24289.html

Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly heavy baryons
Marek Karliner & Jonathan L. Rosner

Nature, 551, 89–91 (02 November 2017) doi:10.1038/nature24289
Received 16 August 2017 Accepted 18 September 2017 Published online 01 November 2017

Thanks, so they are not actually claiming actual observation of a new fusion process, they are only claiming to have done theoretical calculations and/or simulations on a computer?

 

[fresh_42]

It seems so, yes: (https://phys.org/news/2017-11-theoretical-quark-fusion-powerful-hydrogen.html)

The researchers point out that their work is still purely theoretical. They have not tried to fuse bottom quarks, though they note it should be technically feasible at the LHC should others find doing so a worthwhile experiment.

In addition this would be a one time only experiment, i.e. no chain reactions or multiple occurrences, which means that it cannot be used - at least not in combination with words like "fusion", "bomb" or similar nonsense.

 

[websterling]

The paper is available on the arXiv- Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly-heavy baryons

There have been some 'interesting' articles online, mostly similar to The Subatomic Discovery That Physicists Considered Keeping Secret. 'Journalists' ought to be required to take a class in what they try writing about.

 

[mfb]

There are so many bad news reports about this.

The authors just used masses of hadrons measured by others, extrapolated to two undiscovered hadrons and then did some additions and subtractions of masses.

$\Lambda_c^+$ lives about 0.2 picoseconds as it can only decay via the weak interaction. In the very unlikely case that LHC collisions produce two of them, and they form close together, and hit each other, they might react to produce $\Xi_{cc} n$. That would release a bit of energy - but only energy we put in before, and just 13 MeV out of the initial 13 TeV, the remaining 99.9999% are released elsewhere. All these particles only decay via the weak interaction, so in principle they can live long enough for these reactions. It is unclear if the collision of two hadrons after hadronization can happen at all as the geometry would have to be very odd, and it is unclear if that would be observable at all. The authors don't investigate this, they just focus on the theoretical reactions if these hadrons hit each other. The analog reaction with b-quarks instead of c-quarks would be even less frequent.