<i>"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." -- Bob Holdom</i><p>Oh really? Does the paper give any idea about how that might be accomplished and where the energy would come from?<p>EDIT: Ok, I read the paper (it is pretty short) and now I'm tracking down this reference: [34] G. L. Shaw, M. Shin, R. H. Dalitz, and M. Desai, Growing
drops of strange matter, Nature (London) 337, 436 (1989).
Neutron stars would presumably consist in large part of QM, if it exists.<p>Colliding neutron stars spray large chunks of material therefrom, into interstellar space. It is said that this contributes a significant percentage of the gold and uranium on Earth.<p>If QM were stable, would we not therefore expect to observe it in nature, with abundance at least on the order of gold and uranium? Perhaps there is some factor that depresses its abundance somewhat, but to have gone entirely unobserved, it would have to be many orders of magnitude less abundant than gold. Is there any theory that reconciles stable QM with the observed upper bound on abundance?
While possible, this seems like an even more tenuous argument than usual for theoretical work on phys.org. The original paper is an ocean of maybe’s and if’s, all couched in unsupported models that may well have no bearing on reality. I’m also a little turned off by the term “continent of stability” which sounds like a grandiose rephrasing of the more commonly hypothesized “island of stability” further down the table. That island is very much hypothetical, and the stability referenced is in comparison to other super heavy elements, not matter in general.
I couldn't find anything on the expected half-life of udQM in the paper, just how stable are we talking here? The theoretical "island of stability" is only relatively stable (minutes to days) and useless for practical applications.
Very interesting. Would it be correct to say that if true this could lead to an earlier end of the periodic table[0] than had been previously predicted?<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_periodic_table#End_of_the_periodic_table" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_periodic_table#End_of...</a>
The comments on the article poked at this question but the answers given there were not very clear for me, so I'll ask here: If this udQM is so stable, why didn't we find any of it in nature so far?<p>We certainly would know we don't understand this matter if we stumbled upon it... right?
If this udQM with A above 300 were stable it would have been produced in neutron star collissions, along with other heavy elements such as Au, and there should be traces of it in the earth. So far no such udQM has been found.