The particles that make up the neutrons and protons inside of atoms are known as Quarks. From a new study, researchers found that when Quarks bind together energy is produced. Scientists have already been smashing together particles at the Large Hadron Collider but that’s been with Hydrogen atoms, not Quarks.
At the Large Hadron Collider, particles are zooming through a 27 Km long ring at near the speed of light. When particles collide scientists are poised to collect lots of data and sometimes in the data strange particles emerge. Totally unexpectedly! This is precisely what happened when what’s known as a “Doubly Charmed Baryon” emerged in 2016. It was made up of two Charm Quarks.
The publishing of their paper leads other researchers to draw up the calculation of just how much energy would be needed to fuse these Quarks together and how much energy would be released. They found it would take about 130 MeV to fuse the collision of Charm Quark. But wait there is more…
More researchers theorized that if they fused a different type of Quark, a heavier Bottom Quark, it may produce around 138 MeV which is about 8 times more energy than fusing hydrogen. No need to worry about someone creating a boom out of Quark because the scientists say these type of Quarks won’t live long enough after a collision for a chain reaction to happen. In other words, they decay too quickly and won’t be usable for weapons.
Scientists do say it’s technically possible to create this fusion with the Large Hadron Collider and there may be a good chance that in the next couple of years this study will do into action. But before you dream about a fusion future Many scientists don’t think this will ever work. Also, the amount of energy it will take to even combine these together is so high that the energy getting out of it won’t be significantly much more.
Current clean energy systems are generating a good amount of energy but with quark fusion, if scientists can develop a technology to make it the reality. Well, then we will be talking.