Road to science and technology

Just like breaking a magnet into two magnets with north and south poles, the same thing happens when quarks are pulled apart.

Quark confinement is a physical phenomenon, just like without the magnetic poles of a magnet, quarks will not exist alone. Due to the strong interaction force, quarks with color charge are restricted together with other quarks, forming a particle in the form of two or more, making the total color charge zero.

So what the Shenzhou civilization is doing now is to build matter from quarks.

From micro to macro.

The material static field pull-off experiment mentioned by Shui Wangqiu is actually to place some materials in a grand unified force field, and then apply force through the force field to pull apart the quarks in the microstructure of the material.

Obviously, the new quarks generated after pulling the quarks apart will form new protons or neutrons, which is equivalent to converting energy into mass.

"But it's not that simple."

Shui Wangqiu opened the illusory projection of the experimental simulation as he spoke. He pointed to the quark breaking dynamic diagram in the simulation experiment and continued: "Look, for example, if the quarks in a proton are continuously pulled apart by us, more will be produced. Quarks give birth to more protons, does that mean that this mass of matter changes from electrically neutral to charged?"

"Electric substance?"

"Yes, because protons continue to increase but electrons do not appear out of thin air, it does not become positively charged matter."

Is there such a thing? All substances in nature are electrically neutral, but substances created in the laboratory may actually be positively charged.

But this is Shui Wangqiu's own guess.

Yue Yuanzhou turned off the projection with a wave of his hand: "Send the papers related to the experiment and take a look."

Upon hearing this, Shui Wangqiu raised his hand and clicked, and the contents of the projection screen that Yue Yuanzhou had just turned off immediately turned into pages of books.

Yue Yuanzhou browsed it carefully and nodded: "Yes, but a theory is a theory after all. I guess after you do the experiment, some of the ideas in your paper will have to be changed."

I personally think that after the pull-off experiment, although the mass of the material being tested has increased, there should be no positively charged material. Maybe some of the new quarks will decay and become protons and electrons in the process of forming neutrons. .

Maybe there are extra electrons born, which just neutralize that part of the charge. Of course, it is also possible that those electrons were born from quantum vacuum fluctuations. In short, the final material should remain electrically neutral.

Of course, this is just my personal guess, and the specifics will depend on experimental data. "

Although Yue Yuanzhou said this, Shui Wangqiu did not think it was nonsense, so he said: "It makes sense. I will organize the relevant team to conduct special analysis on such issues to ensure the rigor of the experiment."

When he said this, he made a transitional sentence.

"But I have a concern, and that is that the type of new quarks that are born is uncertain."

After hearing this, Yue Yuanzhou pondered for a while and said: "In this case, go to the starry sky to open a separate laboratory. Also, keep those scientific and technological personnel who are not highly enhanced, so as not to be killed by the explosion."

Shui Wangqiu said he was not sure, so Yue Yuanzhou said so, obviously understanding what the other party meant.

Because a single quark itself has three quantum states, after being separated, the Shenzhou civilization cannot guarantee that the quarks converted from energy and matter will be in the same quantum state as the original ones.

This is what Shui Wangqiu said about the uncertain quark type.

Then a problem will arise.

As we all know, antiprotons have the same mass and spin as protons, and have the same lifespan as protons, but their charge and magnetic moment are opposite to protons, and they have the same negative charge as electrons.

A negative proton is composed of two up antiquarks and one down antiquark.

Shui Wangqiu means that it is very likely that if you pull apart the up quark of the proton, you will get an anti-up quark instead of another up quark.

In this way, the matter composed of new quarks is likely to be antimatter composed of antiprotons, antineutrons, and positrons.

This is why Yue Yuanzhou said that scientific and technical personnel should never be killed.

Isn't that right? If antiprotons really appeared in a large-scale separation, wouldn't they immediately annihilate with protons and release huge energy? However, he just said that, the individuals of Shenzhou civilization are basically supermen, and this kind of explosion will not kill people.

"Isn't it possible that the result of the collider is a special case?" Yue Yuanzhou suddenly looked at Shui Wangqiu and said with some uncertainty.

"Is it possible that antiprotons were actually born in the collider, but because they were annihilated with protons immediately after their birth, this process lasted so short that they could not be detected?"

"This" Shui Wangqiu hesitated, and now he was a little unsure.

After all, judging from the collider data alone, this is indeed possible, because the particles collided by the collider are too few compared to the particles contained in a lump of matter.

If the number is small, some other physical phenomena may not be seen.

For example, in terms of probability, if you toss a coin upwards at random, the probability of heads and tails after the coin falls is 1/2. However, if you only toss it a few times, it may not necessarily be that all heads are heads.

Similarly, in hadron collision experiments, the protons that collide are simply a drop in the bucket compared to the particles contained in one gram of matter.

Thinking about it this way, if a large number of quarks are pulled apart, the ratio of the quarks and antiquarks born is 1:1, it would be a tragedy.

Shui Wangqiu sighed: "I hope it won't be like this."

If this is the case, then the current transformation of energy and mass through quark confinement is a pitfall.

A huge pit in the abyss!

After all, a civilization that has developed to the stage where it can pull apart quarks must have been very advanced. Just like the Shenzhou civilization now, it must have a unified force to carry out such an operation.

If the quark confinement phenomenon is a huge pit in the conversion of energy and mass, then the manpower and material resources invested by the Shenzhou civilization will be in vain.

Well, it can't be said that it was in vain. After all, it proved that this road was unreachable.

"Don't worry, design the experiment and send me a copy of the results when the time comes."

Yue Yuanzhou patted Shui Wangqiu on the shoulder and continued: "Science is like this. Only by verifying it can you know whether this path will work. Isn't it just a guess now? Maybe all the new quarks born from pulling apart quarks are quarks, and pulling apart quarks All antiquarks are born are antiquarks!”

Shui Wangqiu nodded and said, "Yes, I hope so!"

As he spoke, he walked to the edge of the bridge, put his hands on the railings, and looked ahead.

In my mind, I was thinking that if it was the second possibility, it would be perfect.

Because that would be tantamount to announcing that the Shenzhou civilization not only mastered the method of directly converting energy into mass, but also meant that the Shenzhou civilization had the ability to produce antimatter on a very large scale.

Note that it is very large.

So far, the methods used by the Shenzhou civilization to create antimatter have not changed much.

It’s still the same trick that Yue Yuanzhou came up with back then:

That is, the first step is to create a gamma particle flow generator.

Then the heavy elements are bombarded with gamma rays. Since heavy elements have abnormal absorption of gamma rays, they are accompanied by energy release. This energy release is the optical radiation produced by the annihilation of positive and negative electrons. In this process, adding a magnetic constraint field to separate the positive and negative electrons is the second step.

The third step is to make a proton synchronized phase-stable accelerator. The purpose of this accelerator is to accelerate the protons to a sufficient energy level and then bombard them on the copper target. At this time, various types of antiprotons, protons, etc. will be produced. , neutrons and various meson hybrid objects.

Then build a star-shaped magnetic confinement separator to separate antiprotons from these particles. In theory, about 30,000 particles can produce one antiproton.

If produced using this method, it takes 30,000 particles to produce one antiproton, which shows that its efficiency is not high. Therefore, if this method works, the Shenzhou civilization will have the ability to produce ultra-large-scale antimatter.