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  • Test facility | How do electronics react to magnetic fields?

    A tokamak is basically a magnetic cage designed to confine, shape and control the super-hot plasmas that make fusion reactions possible. Inside the ITER Tokamak [...]

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    Dated April 2023, this new image of the ITER "planet" places the construction site squarely in the middle. One kilometre long, 400 metres wide, the IT [...]

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Of Interest

See archived entries

Elementary particles

And now quark fusion?

Fusion as we know it involves two nuclei of light atoms. Nature provides a dozen possible combinations for fusion, but in the present state of our technological capabilities only the fusion of deuterium (D) and tritium (T), two hydrogen isotopes, is accessible.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University and at the University of Chicago think that quark fusion could be technically feasible in a powerful particle accelerator such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (Click to view larger version...)
Researchers at Tel Aviv University and at the University of Chicago think that quark fusion could be technically feasible in a powerful particle accelerator such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
Recently, physicists at Tel Aviv University in Israel and at the University of Chicago in the US have found evidence suggesting that fusion could occur between quarks, an elementary particle that is a constituent of the nucleus. Quark fusion, they calculate, could generate approximately eight times more energy than the energy released during DT fusion.

How does one go about fusing quarks? Researchers Marek Karliner and Jonathan Rosner think it could be technically feasible in a powerful particle accelerator such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But they warn that their work is still purely theoretical — just like the fusion of nuclei was not so long ago in the 1920s.

More information here and here.




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