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udQM elements hooray! Tl;dr: SciFi Bulllshit Unobtanium Materials COULD POSSIBLY exist!

Durabys

A Cheshire Exile
So. Because there was interest. I am re-posting my SB thread here.

In other words? That always elusive 'Island of Stability' turns out to be a 'Continent of Stability'. A completely new Periodic Table awaits us. None of these new super-materials are made of Protons or Neutrons.

"Neutronium", "Element Zero", "Naquadah", "Trinium" and other such plot-driving materials may exist after all!

Rest of article on page:
New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
udqm.jpg


A crucial feature of all known baryonic matter is that its quarks are bound together so tightly by the strong force that they are inseparable.

As particles made of bound quarks are called hadrons, scientists refer to the ground state of baryonic matter as «hadronic matter».

One of the new results of the latest study is that quark matter without strange quarks, i.e., udQM, has lower bulk energy per baryon than either SQM or hadronic matter, making it energetically favorable.

In the future, the researchers plan to explore the possibility of searching for quark matter, both on Earth and in more distant locations.

«We would like to know more about the abundance of quark matter in the universe,» the researchers said.

"If quark matter is found (or produced in accelerators), it may be stored and then fed with slow neutrons or heavy ions. The absorption of these particles means a lower total mass and thus a release of energy, mostly in the form of gamma radiation. Unlike nuclear fusion, this is a process that should be easy to initiate and control."
Captains Ivanova and Sheridan: get dreamy expressions
Everyone else: start sweating bullets

Big BOOM? Yes! There will be a BIG BOOM!!!

:naughty:
:drevil:
:evil:

Let's continue the debate where we left it:


Is this udQM thing legit, or is Durabys making mountains out of molehills?
While Durabys can be excitable, he's always one trying for a decent source to back up his claims. At least he isn't Wisky-08, that person acts like a jackrabbit whenever he finds something interesting (and by god, he finds obscure shit like you wouldn't believe).
Double post, but I'm reading the phys.org article now, and it talks about a paper that seems to make a lot of hypotheses without having any observation or whatever, and references similar hypotheses made in 1984, so don't get too excited, it feels more like some nice possibility that still has to be identified, detected, confirmed and whatever.

@Vorpal will most likely be able to give a better opinion on this than whatever I can come up with, but it seriously looks like @Durabys being excited by some bold and currently unverifiable claims. Sorry, lad.
David Khoo on SB thinks it will end in making Strangelet-like particles that will consume the Earth. Opinons?
 
Vorpal's Response
I wonder to what extent a prediction like this is model-independent. Nuclear physics gets rather crazy. :/

Treating the quarks as a Fermi gas, the down quarks should be kinematically disfavoured because they're heavier, and so we can naively expect the minimal energy will be at positive charge. That's about what we see in the graph produced from their use of the MIT bag model: the 'continent of stability' allows for negative charge, but the minimal-energy blue line is towards positive charge Z ∝ ∛A.

So if they're correct, this natural bias combined with absorption of ordinary nuclei naturally providing positive charge should make them pretty safe (David Khoo is probably right on this). And Coulomb barrier penetration for another nucleus with charge Z' will be suppressed by something like exp(-ZZ'k), it should be extraordinary difficult to feed it with anything other than neutrons. Positive charged udQM will also form an electron cloud around itself; sufficiently charged ones will make them through electron-positron pair creation if none are otherwise available.

udqm.jpg
 
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