Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion with doubly heavy baryons

  • Letter
  • Published:

From Nature

View current issue Submit your manuscript

This article has been updated

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

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′).

Similar content being viewed by others

Change history

  • 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.

References

  1. The LHCb Collaboration. Observation of the doubly charmed baryon . Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 112011 (2017)

  2. Karliner, M. & Rosner, J. L. Baryons with two heavy quarks: masses, production, decays, and detection. Phys. Rev. D 90, 094007 (2014)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  3. Karliner, M . & Rosner, J. L. Discovery of doubly-charmed baryon implies a stable tetraquark. Phys. Rev. Lett. (in the press); preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07666 (2017)

  4. Atzeni, S . & Meyer-ter-Vehn, J. The Physics of Inertial Fusion Table 1.1, Ch. 1 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2004)

  5. Gell-Mann, M. The Eightfold Way: A Theory of strong interaction symmetry. Report No. TID-12608; CTSL-20, https://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/4008239 (California Institute of Technology, 1961)

  6. Okubo, S. Note on unitary symmetry in strong interactions. Prog. Theor. Phys. 27, 949–966 (1962)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  7. Gal, A., Hungerford, E. V. & Millener, D. J. Strangeness in nuclear physics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 88, 035004 (2016)

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  8. Harada, T., Hirabayashi, Y. & Umeya, A. Production of doubly strange hypernuclei via Ξ− doorways in the 16O(K−, K+) reaction at 1.8 GeV/c. Phys. Lett. B 690, 363–368 (2010)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Dover, C. B. & Gal, A. Ξ hypernuclei. Ann. Phys. 146, 309–348 (1983)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Wang, M. et al. The AME2016 atomic mass evaluation (II). Tables, graphs and references. Chinese Phys C. 41, 030003 (2017); data available at https://www-nds.iaea.org/relnsd/vcharthtml/VChartHTML.html.

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  11. The LHCb Collaboration. RICH Technical Design Report. Report No. LHCC 2000-037, http://lhcb.web.cern.ch/lhcb/rich/pdf/richtdr.pdf (CERN, 2000)

  12. The LHCb Collaboration. Measurement of the B± production cross-section in pp collisions at = 7 TeV. J. High Energy Phys. 4, 93 (2012)

  13. The LHCb Collaboration. Measurement of B meson production cross-sections in proton-proton collisions at = 7 TeV. J. High Energy Phys. 8, 117 (2013)

  14. The LHCb Collaboration. Study of the production of and hadrons in pp collisions and first measurement of the branching fraction. Chinese Phys. C 40, 011001 (2016)

  15. Dainese, A. Heavy-quark production in heavy-ion collisions. J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 446, 012034 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Grelli, A. Experimental overview on heavy-flavor production. J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 832, 012020 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Schaffner, J., Dover, C. B., Gal, A., Greiner, C. & Stoecker, H. Strange hadronic matter. Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 1328–1331 (1993)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

  18. Schaffner, J. et al. Multiply strange nuclear systems. Ann. Phys. 235, 35–76 (1994)

    Article  ADS  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

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.

Author information

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

Authors
  1. Marek Karliner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jonathan L. Rosner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

Both authors contributed equally to this work.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marek Karliner.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Additional information

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

Publisher's note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

PowerPoint slides

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

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

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24289

  • Springer Nature Limited

This article is cited by

Search

Navigation