More on Q-Balls

[Dalex]

Well nature offers us lots of options for potential Q-ball composition.
First of all the particles from which our q-balls have to be bosons, particles that have integer spin, we have plenty of those. However for them to form some sort of matter they have to be charged. Therefore we must rule most of elementary bosons out except for W- and W+.
These particles have half-life of 3×10^−25 s so these are going to be hard to use.
But then there are composite bosons and we have those in spades, from simple pions to helium-4.
For example pions have life time of 2.6×10^−8s, which is much more reasonable than W bosons.
However fact that we need bosons with charge means that we have to rule some of them out.
Pions with their lifetime, mass and charge seem to be good choice for constructing some sort of
Q-ball matter.

As to its properties I honestly can not tell. However I think that wouldn’t have as much strength compared to magmatter because of its much lower density. In fact it is possible that its density would be lower than that of normal matter.

[Tachyon]

Sounds cool I have a few simple questions;

- What would the appearance of a Q-ball be?

They're spherically symmetric and charged, so they interact readily with matter. You probably wouldn't want to get close to them since they're gamma ray emitters.

Q-matter, like regular matter, has a radius depending upon the number of particles, and a spectrum of vibrations about its equilibrium. These surface waves lead to a range of low-lying excited states.

The internal excitation (phonon) spectrum is proportional to , whereas the surface wave frequency is proportional to . Upon catalyzing baryon decay a certain amount of energy is converted to phonons via momentum conservation. And as I've mentioned earlier, you can scatter protons (quarks) off a Q-ball to produce leptons (electrons).

- How could you (theoretically) make one?

In the LHC or any other hadron collider at the TeV scale, depending on the scale of supersymmetry-breaking soft masses. In particular, once we find squarks and sleptons we can combine them to get the "flat directions" that produce Q-balls.

Another way to do so is to obtain the color-triplet Higgsinos from the electroweak Higgs doublets (this of course, assumes there is more than one Higg's boson). Once you have the color-triplets, you can pair produce them in a hadron collider. It's even possible to find them as cosmological relics on Earth (although the likelihood is constrained to be small).

- What would the density of a Q-ball be? More or less than magmatter?

Less, it's essentially like normal matter but with a very high charge. A Q-ball of a few microns in diameter would be about 100 tons.

In fact, it's very good at storing charge, as its energy is proportional to rather than Q, meaning the larger the Q-ball the more energetically preferable storing charge there is.

Of course, as you start getting very strong charges you start electrostatic ally dissociating matter!

- What would happen if you dropped one onto a planet? For that matter what happens if you drop monopoles? Will they sink to the core and slowly break the world apart?

Both would tend to sink to the core and eat matter until the radiation pressure from the annihilated matter regulates the infall of matter. The rate of power production is proportional to surface area which is proportional to the number of particles.

Monopoles would tend to travel along the magnetic lines, but otherwise do the same thing. However, they don't tend to clump up the way Q-balls do, so they would be less efficient than a very large Q-ball.

[Tachyon]

I've updated the Gehenna Incident article:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464e89d70a038

to reflect the use of Q-balls and the elimination of both strange matter and artificial neutronium from the setting. Please give it a look and confirm this will work as written.

I'd also like to redo the article on Disintegrator Weapons to make them Q-ball based, but will need to do that at a later time.

Thanks!

Todd

I suggest changing:

...possibly due to runaway Q-ball catalysis or the formation of large amounts of magmatter...

to:

possibly due to runaway baryon catalysis from Q-balls or magmatter ...

Otherwise looks good (and interesting!) to me.

[Drashner1]

I was going to make the suggested adjustment to the article, but it looks like someone (probably Steve) has beaten me to it.

Thanks Steve!

Todd

[irigi]

Some numbers: 10E8 watts using a 100 ton Q-Ball a few microns in diameter with a charge of 10E40. Or using 10E17 Q-Balls each with a charge of 10E6 (units of charge equal to e).

Some advantages over monopoles:

Easier to make

What is the proposed way how to create so large Q-balls? It doesn't seem like an easy way to accumulate 1E6 elementary charges at one place before Q-ball decays. (Even if it doesn't decay almost from the beginning.) You certainly cannot create 100-ton beast out of vacuum.. Why is it easier than creation of monopoles? Thank you!

[Dalex]

Some numbers: 10E8 watts using a 100 ton Q-Ball a few microns in diameter with a charge of 10E40. Or using 10E17 Q-Balls each with a charge of 10E6 (units of charge equal to e).

Some advantages over monopoles:

Easier to make

What is the proposed way how to create so large Q-balls? It doesn't seem like an easy way to accumulate 1E6 elementary charges at one place before Q-ball decays. (Even if it doesn't decay almost from the beginning.) You certainly cannot create 100-ton beast out of vacuum.. Why is it easier than creation of monopoles? Thank you!

Everything is easier when you make it iterative.
You could start with smaller q-balls and proceed to bigger ones.

[irigi]

Probably another unrelated concern. On Wikipedia and here, they write that q-balls are stable because of charge conservation. If you have positive q-ball with 1E6 - 1E40 elementary charges, it will probably strongly suck in electrons and emit neutrinos and radiate its mass away until it is gone. To isolate such strong charge from other charges seems like extremely challenging engineering problem.

For the same reason, it might be very impractical to shoot the q-ball with protons to obtain energy. If the q-ball is positive, it will be very difficult to get to the q-ball through the Coulombic barrier. (Although if you succeed, you are refilling the q-ball charge, which is good.) If it is negative, it might emit neutral particles and get smaller and smaller as it loses charge. But I guess you can always construct device that would hit the q-ball by neutrons.

Unrelated note: very good defense against q-ball cannons may be to charge the spaceship. Even small charge will repel the q-balls strongly.

[Ithuriel]

For anyone who hasn't already been able to read them, the first two papers mentioned above are available for free on Arxiv.

Analytical and numerical properties of Q-balls

New physics in a nutshell, or Q-ball as a power plant

Also plenty of other interesting things to be found.

511 keV line from Q balls in the Galactic Center

[Drashner1]

Probably another unrelated concern. On Wikipedia and here, they write that q-balls are stable because of charge conservation. If you have positive q-ball with 1E6 - 1E40 elementary charges, it will probably strongly suck in electrons and emit neutrinos and radiate its mass away until it is gone. To isolate such strong charge from other charges seems like extremely challenging engineering problem.

For the same reason, it might be very impractical to shoot the q-ball with protons to obtain energy. If the q-ball is positive, it will be very difficult to get to the q-ball through the Coulombic barrier. (Although if you succeed, you are refilling the q-ball charge, which is good.) If it is negative, it might emit neutral particles and get smaller and smaller as it loses charge. But I guess you can always construct device that would hit the q-ball by neutrons.

Unrelated note: very good defense against q-ball cannons may be to charge the spaceship. Even small charge will repel the q-balls strongly.

This may be a reason why q-balls are used to make monopoles and monopoles are then used to breed more monopoles for various conversion applications. At least at the S2 level. The controlled environment of a monopole forge might allow for preventing or mitigating the issues mentioned with losing mass. At least long enough to make a starter batch of monopoles.

At higher S-levels (S3 perhaps), we might postulate that it becomes much easier to stabilize q-balls and things like Q-guns become an option. Exactly how this is done could be one of the 'magic tricks' of the transapients.

As far as defending against them - While ships and habs could use a charge to protect themselves from pure Q-ball fire - planets/moons/stars/etc. are not so readily protected. In the RL different weapons are used for different applications and targets. It seems likely that this would persist in the OA future. Even in the case of ships and habs, once other weapons do enough damage to knock out the charge protection, a Q-weapon could deliver a killing final blow.

Todd

[Ithuriel]

In the case of q-balls bearing a relatively low charge, I suspect that it should be possible to charge them up further using a particle accelerator firing heavy nuclei. I'm too lazy to do the maths on that one, however!

There's probably an upper limit to this process. The 'new physics' article linked above talks about asteroid-mass q-balls with charges in excess of 10^50 being needed to do physics at the GUT level, which would be needed for monopole formation. This starts to sound harder than creating a world-sized particle accelerator!

I've also just been trying to read this: Charged Q-balls and boson stars. (I used to read webcomics over breakfast; this is all entirely the fault of you guys!) Most of the mathematics is beyond me, but it does suggest that charged q-balls which are too small to self-gravitate have a limited size, above which they become unstable. This may be bad news for q-balls in this scenario, but to be honest I've no way of telling