Tau.Neutrino said:
New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table
Currently, the heaviest element on the periodic table is oganesson, which has an atomic mass of 294 and was officially named in 2016. Like every element on the periodic table, nearly all of oganesson’s mass comes from protons and neutrons (types of baryons) that are themselves made of three quarks each
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-periodic-table.html#jCp
See also https://tokyo3.org/forums/holiday/topics/9855/
What I said there was that computer predictions that are the most accurate to date suggest that there are no further islands of stability. But that, since the most accurate prediction to date gets the half life of thorium wrong by a factor of 100 billion, the prediction of what is beyond the known elements, to quote Douglas Adams, “isn’t worth a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys”.
So let’s see how good this new one is.
For high enough atomic number “these quarks wouldn’t be bound into triplets”. Hmm, possible. For more information see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_star
“It is hypothesized that under even more extreme conditions, the degeneracy pressure keeping the quarks apart within the neutrons might break down in much the same way, creating an ultra-dense phase of degenerate matter based on densely packed quarks. This is seen as plausible, but is very hard to prove”.
“The hypothesis about quark stars was first proposed in 1965 by Soviet physicists D. D. Ivanenko and D. F. Kurdgelaidze. Their existence has not been confirmed. The equation of state of quark matter is uncertain, as is the transition point between neutron-degenerate matter and quark matter. Theoretical uncertainties have precluded making predictions.”
Or to put it another way, if neutron stars exist then quarks really do bind in triplets way beyond the end of the known periodic table. Quark stars would look like neutron stars but have a different diameter.
Or to put it a third way, the energies of the LHC failed to produce a quark-gluon plasma with lead-lead collisions, which suggests that quarks bind very strongly together into neutrons.
The hypothesis that neutrons decouple into free quarks at a low enough energy to be detectable in superheavy isotopes is extremely speculative, and may already be ruled out either by neutron star observations or by LHC lead-lead collisions.
The title of their paper “quark matter need not be strange” suggests that they may be ignorant of the 1965 proposal of non-strange quark matter and subsequent studies before the first proposal of strange matter in 1984.