Strangelets at Brookhaven?

[pianoman1976]

(Don't stand next to the particle accelerator.)

 

GO! Gold ions fired from a powerful tandem Van de Graaff accelerator travel through a particle booster and the alternating gradient synchrotron, which sends the ions through a magnetic switchyard at 99.995 percent of the speed of light. Two ion beams emerge from the switchyard and enter RHIC, traveling in opposite directions around the track. A magnetic field - created by superconducting magnets wrapped in niobium titanium wire carrying a 5,000-amp current - forces the beams to collide inside the monitoring stations, such as STAR.

 

WHAP! During the collisions, the kinetic energy of the ions (roughly 40 trillion electron volts) is converted into heat, with temperatures reaching 1 trillion degrees Kelvin - almost 1 million times hotter than the core of the sun. The blast melts the protons and neutrons.

 

EUREKA! The melting releases quarks and gluons that, for a fleeting 10 trillionths of a trillionth of a second, form QGP. As the temperature drops, the plasma coalesces to its original state, but not before RHIC's detectors record its properties and behavior. Each chamber focuses on a different aspect of the collision. STAR, for instance, detects the presence of QGP indirectly, by measuring the production of two- and three-quark bundles called hadrons.

 

EEK! Here's where things could start to go wrong. All atom smashers produce a mixture of the six flavors of quarks: up and down, charm and strange, top and bottom. Because RHIC produces more collisions, chances are it could produce more strange quarks. Under normal conditions, these quickly decay to become lower-energy up or down quarks. But in RHIC's ultrahigh-pressure environment, those strange quarks could feasibly remain stable long enough to combine with up and down quarks to form a strangelet. If the strangelet contains more strange quarks than ups or downs, it will have a negative charge.

 

R.I.P. A negatively charged strangelet would trigger a relentless process of electron-positron pair creation. The strangelet would strip away the electrons of any normal atom it came in contact with and absorb the exposed nucleus. The process would continue until all matter was converted into strangelets.

 

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/9910/9910333v3.pdf

[Erasmus00]

Well, RHIC has been running for awhile now, and nothing like this has happened. Thus, it seems to me we need not worry.

-Will

[pianoman1976]

I think the Campbell's Soup Co. should make a QGP variety of their popular alphabet soup.

 

Quark-Gluon Stew "It's only here for a limited time..get some before it's too late!"

 

They could pop it in and out of their product line - like the McRib.

[Turtle]

(Don't stand next to the particle accelerator.)

 

roger wilco

 

 

R.I.P. A negatively charged strangelet would trigger a relentless process of electron-positron pair creation. The strangelet would strip away the electrons of any normal atom it came in contact with and absorb the exposed nucleus. The process would continue until all matter was converted into strangelets.

 

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/9910/9910333v3.pdf

Abstract

We discuss speculative disaster scenarios inspired by hypothetical new fundamental processes that might occur in high energy relativistic heavy ion collisions. We estimate the parameters relevant to black hole production; we find that they are absurdly small. We show that other accelerator and (especially) cosmic ray environments have already provided far more auspicious opportunities for transition to a new vacuum state, sothat existing observations provide stringent bounds. We discuss in most detail the possibility of producing a dangerous strangelet. We argue that four separate requirements are necessary for this to occur: existence of large stable strangelets, metastability of intermediate size strangelets,negative charge for strangelets along the stability line, and production of intermediate size strangelets in the heavy ion environment. We discuss both theoretical and experimental reasons why each of these appears unlikely; in particular, we know of no plausible suggestion for why the third or especially the fourth might be true. Given minimal physical assumptions the continued existence of the Moon, in the form we know it, despite billions of years of cosmic ray exposure, provides powerful empirical evidence against the possibility of dangerous strangelet production.

 

Well, RHIC has been running for awhile now, and nothing like this has happened. Thus, it seems to me we need not worry.

-Will

 

i've been running in front of cars for years and i've never been hit. :hihi: :eek2: should i worry about running in front of cars? :evil:

 

both will and the authors of the paper seem to agree it's just an acceptable risk? what's the probability again that supports 'highly unlikely'? :omg: by the bolded 2 possibilities the authors give in the Abstract for starting the cascade, it seems the machine is actually making the creation of large stable strangelets or metastable intermediate size strangelets more likely because it confines & sustains the reactions.

 

i wanted to give my 2 cents worth; can i borry a penny from someone? :hyper: :wave:

[Buffy]

Here's a penny from me, Mr. Turtle! :)

 

Anything is possible, but its a lot less interesting than The Andromeda Strain or better yet Crack in the World....

 

Earthquakes, tidal waves, mass destruction on an apocalyptic scale! :phones:

Buffy

[Turtle]

...the authors of the paper seem to agree it's just an acceptable risk? what's the probability again that supports 'highly unlikely'? ...:phones: :)

 

oh...it's a word game.

When we make quantitative estimates of possible dangerous events at RHIC, we will quote our results as a probability, p, of a single dangerous event over the lifetime of RHIC (assumed to encompass approximately 2×1011 gold-gold collisions over a 10 year lifetime at full luminosity). We do not attempt to decide what is an acceptible upper limit on p, nor do we attempt a “risk analysis”, weighing the probability of an adverse event against the severity of its consequences. Ultimately, we rely on compelling physics arguments which, we believe, exclude a dangerous event beyond any reasonable level of concern.

 

everyone wins, or everyone loses! :doh: :hyper: :D

[Turtle]

Here's a penny from me, Mr. Turtle! :doh:

 

Anything is possible, but its a lot less interesting than The Andromeda Strain or better yet Crack in the World....

 

Earthquakes, tidal waves, mass destruction on an apocalyptic scale! :D

Buffy

 

bless you. :) i'll spend it straight away on the survival wagon. :phones: :hyper:

[snoopy]

Here's a penny from me, Mr. Turtle! :lol:

 

Anything is possible, but its a lot less interesting than The Andromeda Strain or better yet Crack in the World....

 

Earthquakes, tidal waves, mass destruction on an apocalyptic scale! :umno:

Buffy

 

 

Thats nothing when the LHC at Cern starts up there is a small possibility a blackhole could form above the Earth, devouring the Earth and the entire solar system.

 

BBC - Horizon - The Six Billion Dollar Experiment

 

'Or possibly the fabric of spacetime maybe ripped apart producing a truly cosmic cataclysm.'

Beat that.....

 

Cheers

:)

[Buffy]

Thats nothing when the LHC at Cern starts up there is a small possibility a blackhole could form above the Earth, devouring the Earth and the entire solar system.

Now that sounds more like the final scene of The Sorpranos....

 

Fuggedaboudit,

Buffy

[pianoman1976]

Now that sounds more like the final scene of The Sorpranos....

 

Fuggedaboudit,

Buffy

 

Who was that strangelet of a man with the members only jacket?

[TheFaithfulStone]

When we make quantitative estimates of possible dangerous events at RHIC, we will quote our results as a probability, p, of a single dangerous event over the lifetime of RHIC

 

What was p?

 

Pregnant with condom, pregnant with pill, pregnant with vasectomy, or virgin birth unlikely?

 

TFS

[terms i can understand, now please.]

[Qfwfq]

[terms i can understand, now please.]

Uhm, I gather it's about [imath]20\cdot10^{-9}[/imath]

 

[TheFaithfulStone]

So... uhhh....

 

That's like virgin birth, right?

 

TFS