Quark-Gluon surprise

My Nan always made the best Quark-Gluon Surprise. Hers had chunks of pineapple in the bottom.

My mom made something similar, but the pineapple bits she'd gluon the sides.

Well, anything that coaxes those shy quarks out of their homes is a good thing, even if it's one of those hot, crowded mixer parties the gluons throw.

Ahem, it's getting close to the time for Krampus and Christmas songs, isn't it?

We Three Quarks, sung to the tune of We Three Kings
(I did not write this. I don't know who did.)

We three quarks, fine particles are
Strange and charmed, we traverse afar
Fields and forces, spin of course
All divided by h-bar

Chorus:
Oh, quarks are wondrous
Quarks are light
Quarks have colours clear and bright
Ever intriguing, ever misleading
All the physicists in sight

We three quarks
Trade gluons all day
Baryons are made in this way
Confined inside, we always hide
Unseen forever stay

Chorus:
Oh, quarks are wondrous
Quarks are light
Quarks stay smugly out of sight
Ever intriguing, ever misleading
All the physicists in sight

I was tempted to make some really horrid joke out of the thread title, but two people have already beat me to it. So:

A bit of a derail, but I haven't seen it discussed here: One of the major astrophysical enigmas is whether or not "quark" stars exist. These would be something intermediate to neutron stars and black holes, where the gravitational squeezing is enough to dissociate neutrons into their constituent quarks, but not enough to actually cause complete collapse into a black hole. From what I've read, physicists think there exists a set of boundary conditions in which this kind of object could exist, although it might be temporary, by astrophysical standards. A typical neutron star has the diameter of a large city. A quark star, would be about half that size. But, as opposed to neutron stars, which emit energy in the form of x-rays and some longer-wave radiation (including the visible spectrum), a quark star might emit nothing visible. So how would it be detected? The gravitational pull would be great, but concentrated in a very small space, and really difficult to discern, if it were even possible.

Damn them gluons, anyway.

caw

blacbird said:

A bit of a derail, but I haven't seen it discussed here: One of the major astrophysical enigmas is whether or not "quark" stars exist. These would be something intermediate to neutron stars and black holes, where the gravitational squeezing is enough to dissociate neutrons into their constituent quarks, but not enough to actually cause complete collapse into a black hole. From what I've read, physicists think there exists a set of boundary conditions in which this kind of object could exist, although it might be temporary, by astrophysical standards. A typical neutron star has the diameter of a large city. A quark star, would be about half that size. But, as opposed to neutron stars, which emit energy in the form of x-rays and some longer-wave radiation (including the visible spectrum), a quark star might emit nothing visible. So how would it be detected? The gravitational pull would be great, but concentrated in a very small space, and really difficult to discern, if it were even possible.

Click to expand...

Ooh, aah, that was a shiny pretty derail! Thank you!

Titled link: 'Littlest' quark-gluon plasma revealed by physicists using Large Hadron Collider

It was produced by collisions between protons and lead nuclei, something done at the end of the LHC's previous run. It behaves much like this state when produced by other experiments like LHC lead-lead collisions and nucleus collisions at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider.

This is essentially a gas of quarks and gluons, where they are not split up into lots of lumps with only a few of them in each one -- hadrons.