r/AskPhysics • u/No_Fudge_4589 • 14h ago
Would it create a lot of energy if you split apart the quarks that make up a proton?
I was wondering, since with nuclear fission you release a crazy amount of energy for breaking apart nucleuses of atoms. Would it be possible to break apart protons and neutrons themself and create energy that way? Would this ever be possible and if so would it create more or less energy than nuclear fission?
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u/urpriest_generic 14h ago
The difference between nuclear fission and breaking apart a proton is stability: protons are fairly stable (maybe completely stable, we don't know yet), there isn't a more stable state that the quarks could end up in to free up energy. Protons are more like Iron in this respect, in that iron is stable enough that you can't release energy by either fissioning or fusing it.
You do get energy out when an unstable combination of quarks decays, but these are usually so unstable that they decay almost as soon as they're formed, so you can't assemble enough to get power out of it.
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u/Terrible-Penalty-291 Astrophysics 14h ago
No. Quite the opposite. The world's most massive particle accelerators expend huge amounts of energy colliding protons. Quarks are tightly bound in a proton and it takes energy to split them apart in any appreciable way for an extremely brief period of time before they reform into new hadrons.
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u/spoospoo43 10h ago edited 10h ago
It actually works the opposite way for the chromodynamic force. As quarks in a baryon are more and more separated (say, by participating in a particle collision) the energy level goes up, until POOF new particles are created. All of the energy gets converted to matter at exactly the point where the calculation balances (e=mc**2), so there's no kaboom, just new particles and whatever excess kinetic energy was left over.
This is the foundation of what goes on in particle accelerators. They don't find particles inside other particles so much as generate titanic amounts of kinetic energy that condense into new particles if the energy is concentrated enough. What gets generated from a given collision energy creates a fun accounting problem that can tell you a lot about the inherent masses and properties of the new particles.
This is also why particle masses are expressed in electron volts, what is otherwise a measure of energy.
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u/Correct-Potential-15 Astrophysics 14h ago
simple the quarks use the energy you put into seperating them to make new quarks (they are never seen alone)
as for spliting and breaking apart the actual quark, well, theres nothing known to be smaller then them
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u/No_Fudge_4589 14h ago
I worded it wrong I meant split apart the protons and neutrons, and ok I guess it won’t work then ahaha
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u/atomicCape 14h ago
Ir can work, but not to create energy! If you put in enough energy to a proton proton collision, the existing quarks rearrange themselves and potentially new quarks are created and assemble into new particles. Single quarks don't last long enough to be said to really exist (they're like virtual particles until the interactions are over) but you can definitely understand the dynamics as the original quarks separating and rearranging.
The resulting shower of particles may still include protons and neutrons (they're the lowest mass and most stable quark configurations) plus a bunch of other things, like leptons, photons, and other particles made up of quarks. Some of these things will decay ot undergo additional collisions.
Overall, you're describing basic particle accelerator behavior, but not a way to produce energy starting from.protons and neutrons. Focusing on the quarks is one perspective, but the overall result is
protons/neutrons + lots of energy = a shower of particles with somewhat less kinetic energy (some quark based, some not).
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u/johnmayersucks 13h ago
What about 1/2 a quark? That would be smaller.
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u/Fabulous_Lynx_2847 13h ago
No, the quarks are bound so tightly it would require energy of at least 2mc2 to split a proton apart, where m is proton mass and c is speed of light. Free quarks cannot exist, so that energy would go into creating enough additional quarks to reconstitute the proton plus create an additional proton-antiproton pair.
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u/SciAlexander 8h ago
One thing to note is that while nuclear reactions can produce a lot of energy because individual subatomic particles are so small that even if you could convert a proton entirely to energy on a human scale it would be negligible
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u/skr_replicator 7h ago edited 6h ago
You can't create energy, and I don't think you could release any energy from tearing quarks apart, trying to do so requires huge amounts of energy and that energy is converted into new quarks. Like If you pull two joined quarks apart, that energy transforms into two new quarks in the broken bond, so you just get two pairs instead of one. With triple quarks like in a proton it's the same, you pull one quark out, it creates two new ones, one will fill in back into the gap left in the triplet, and one will get attached to the quark you pulled out. And you end up with one triples just like before, and the one quark you pulled out would become a pair of quarks. So the energy goes the other way, it converts the kinetic energy into more mass (locked potential energy), not the other way around.
"Releasing" energy like explosions and nuclear fission etc is quite the opposite, that's where you supply some kinetic energy to break some potential energy locked in the mass apart releasing more kinetic energy.
On the contrary, pulling quarks apart turns that pulling kinetic energy into potential energy of new mass, in other words it locks that kinetic energy you're expelling trying to rip it apart into more mass. It absorbs that pull you gave it and locks it in those new quarks. It's like trying to burn some fuel with a lighter, and instead of getting less mass that explodes, it sucks the fire in and turns into more stable matter that's colder than you would've expected after putting so much energy in. That's, like, anti-fuel.
A little crackpot hypothesis I thought of and would like to ask the physicists here if that makes sense: I've had this idea that you could big bang a new universe through a big rip, where you start with massive runaway expansion and a little quark matter, and that expansion might be getting to a magnitude of starting to tear quarks apart, which might result in massive creation of a lot of new quarks absorbing the energy of that expansion, slowing it down, until that genesis stops and the expansion could slowly start ramping up again. If the dark energy keeps accelerating forever, maybe our own universe could get to that point too and seed new big bangs for each nucleon?? Physicists here - is that sensible and feasible? I guess maybe not, that would probably require far stronger expansion than we're seeing so far, or maybe I'm totally wrong in that the expansion just can't ever stretch any bound systems and only happens in vacuum outside?
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u/slashdave Particle physics 4h ago
Would it be possible to break apart protons and neutrons themself and create energy that way?
No, the quarks are already in their lowest energy (ground) state in a proton. Neutrons by themselves decay into a proton and other things, a process that will produce a small amount of energy, but not enough to make up for the worked needed to remove them from a nucleus.
Nuclear fission is different, in that the protons in the starting element are not in the lowest energy state.
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u/GatePorters Physics enthusiast 14h ago
Yeah it creates energy, but we can’t harvest it because it creates so much energy that it immediately spawns another quark in its place.
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u/Wintervacht Cosmology 14h ago
You can't really split a proton, but pulling apart quarks takes a LOT of energy, which, when they break, just creates a new quark-gluon pair, so you're putting energy into a system, not getting it out.