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Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly heavy baryons

Nature volume 551, pages 89–91 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

The essence of nuclear fusion is that energy can be released by the rearrangement of nucleons between the initial- and final-state nuclei. The recent discovery1 of the first doubly charmed baryon , which contains two charm quarks (c) and one up quark (u) and has a mass of about 3,621 megaelectronvolts (MeV) (the mass of the proton is 938 MeV) also revealed a large binding energy of about 130 MeV between the two charm quarks. Here we report that this strong binding enables a quark-rearrangement, exothermic reaction in which two heavy baryons (Λc) undergo fusion to produce the doubly charmed baryon and a neutron n (), resulting in an energy release of 12 MeV. This reaction is a quark-level analogue of the deuterium–tritium nuclear fusion reaction (DT → 4He n). The much larger binding energy (approximately 280 MeV) between two bottom quarks (b) causes the analogous reaction with bottom quarks () to have a much larger energy release of about 138 MeV. We suggest some experimental setups in which the highly exothermic nature of the fusion of two heavy-quark baryons might manifest itself. At present, however, the very short lifetimes of the heavy bottom and charm quarks preclude any practical applications of such reactions.

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Figure 1: Schematic depiction of quark-level exothermic fusion reactions ΛQΛQ′ → ΞQQ′N, where Q, Q′ ∈ {b, c}.
Figure 2: The energy release ΔE in the quark-level fusion reactions ΛQΛQ′ → ΞQQ′N, where Q, Q′ ∈ {s, c, b}, plotted against the reduced masses of the doubly heavy diquarks, μred(QQ′).

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  • 30 November 2017

    Please see accompanying Erratum (http://doi.org/10.1038/nature25141). In this Letter, on the right-hand side of the fifth line of equation (2), ‘3He p’ should read ‘4He p’. This error has been corrected online.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Gal for calling our attention to refs 17 and 18. We thank V. Belyaev, S. Brodsky, A. Gal and T. Skwarnicki for comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics and Astronomy, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69978, Israel

    Marek Karliner

  2. Enrico Fermi Institute and Department of Physics, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, 60637, USA

    Jonathan L. Rosner

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  1. Marek Karliner
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Both authors contributed equally to this work.

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Correspondence to Marek Karliner.

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Reviewer Information Nature thanks G. Miller and S. Stone for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Karliner, M., Rosner, J. Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly heavy baryons. Nature 551, 89–91 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24289

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