The Subatomic Discovery That Physicists Considered Keeping Secret

The article hardy makes any sense. You can't make a fusion of bottom quarks because they don't stick together. Reading the abstract of the paper, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v551/n7678/full/nature2... the reaction is

Lambda_b + Lambda_b -> Xi_bb + n

(up+down+bottom) + (up+down+bottom) -> (up+bottom+bottom) + (up+down+down)

This makes sense because each quark is inside a baryon with three quarks.

They say this is equivalent to the fusion of

D + T -> He + n

[proton+neutron] + [proton+neutron+neutron] -> [proton+proton+neutron+neutron] + neutron

[(up+up+down)+(up+down+down)] + [(up+up+down)+(up+down+down)+(up+down+down)] -> [(up+up+down)+(up+up+down)+(up+down+down)+(up+down+down)] + (up+down+down)

The analogy is very very very week. They are very different reactions.

The worse part is the total linkbait title. If you somehow magically can create a lot of Lambdas_b, in a very small time all of them will get transformed into protons, electrons and a lot of gamma rays. If you have enough you will have a nice explosion.

But if in the middle of the transformation they collide and produce some Xi_bb, the Xi_bb's will decay soon into protons, electrons and a lot of gamma rays. You don't get more energy because some of the Lambda_b get temporaly transformed into Xi_bb, the final energy is the same, so the risk is obviously zero.

For comparison, Deuterium is stable and Tritium is almost stable, so you can produce and accumulate them conveniently. And a bunch of Deuterium and Tritium will not cause spontaneously a nuclear explosion. But if you convince them to undergo fusion, you get a nice explosion. The final products are stable Helium and almost stable neutrons, so this reaction is enabled because Helium exist, so D+T->He+n is interesting.

I think we are nearing click bait here, which is becoming a more and more common on HN

1 picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel half the length of a single grain of salt. What a Joycean level of measurement.

The article talks about fusion chain reactions in hydrogen bombs, but the fusion in hydrogen bombs isn't an exponential sequence of chain reactions, it's due to very high temperatures caused by fission chain reactions in the primary. Hence the term "thermonuclear".

Despite the fact that a bottom quark fusion event emits 18 times the energy of traditional fusion (deuterium nuclei), the discoverers note that it's not possible to create a chain reaction of bottom quark fusions. So there are no military applications (or energy applications for that matter).