New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table

Re:New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table by sp332 on Friday June 15, 2018 @02:03PM (#17322014)

When particles come together and form a nucleus, it releases energy. This energy is because the new form is more energetically favorable, that is it requires less energy than the particles had separately. This is what makes it stable - it requires input of energy to undo the release of energy. (It doesn't guarantee that some other state is even more stable, like some kind of fission. But going directly back to the form it was in takes extra energy.) This is called the binding energy and it's the same as any other kind of fusion.

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Re:New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table by ChuckMcM on Friday June 15, 2018 @02:27PM (#17322229)

I'm up to speed on the physics behind fusion and fission, what I am missing is this fractional fusion/fission idea with respect to quarks.

The suggestion was (as I understand it) that one could "inject/collide/drop" a neutron onto this matter and the neutron would then fission into it's component quarks, capturing them and releasing the binding energy. So this stable matter is a quark soup held together by the strong force because you've managed to get enough up and down quarks together at a low enough energy?

It isn't a mechanism I'm familiar with and I was interested if there was any experimental results to suggest this stuff would behave the way they hope it would.

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Re:New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table by gus_massa on Friday June 15, 2018 @03:05PM (#17322580)

I think they don't have any experiment results, only some new (unproven) theoretical ideas.

Moreover, I'm skeptical because a similar idea may apply in neutron starts, but the current model of neutron starts has a crust of about 100m (300ft) that has different kinds of intermediate structures with a lot of neutrons and protons and is called "nuclear pasta" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pasta

I can't find how much experimental support has nuclear pasta, but IIUC there are some measurements of the density of the layers of the neutron stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star#Density_and_press...

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