More on Q-Balls

[Tachyon]

tldr; Q-Balls serve as an efficient power source. Basically, stick a Q-Ball in a beam of protons, and you'll get 1GeV of high energy gammas and pions per proton.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...9397013786 (let me know if you can't see this)

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...275#bID103 (ditto)

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.7487v1.pdf

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
Easier to confine electric charges
Easier to shield from detection (electric charge can be masked, magnetic fields generally not except via superconductors)

BTW, dropping a Q-Ball into a neutron star causes it to supernova. Increasing charge on a Q-Ball = increasing energy regime in the core, e.g. a Q-Ball with a charge of ~10E60E is pretty close to GUT. This means you may be able to use a Q-Ball to make monopoles, or other artifacts of the just barely post-Big Bang universe.

[Drashner1]

Hm. First thought that comes to mind (I need to read the articles yet) is that either the S2 make monopoles by first making a Q ball with great difficulty and using it as a 'factory' or that Q balls are how the archai make their monopoles, assuming that they allow for greater production or efficiency than whatever method the S2 use.

Todd

[iancampbell]

Tachyon - Is that actually so? The reason I'm asking the question is that a high proportion of the released energy is in the form of neutrinos, which are fairly useless at low tech levels.

[Tachyon]

Tachyon - Is that actually so? The reason I'm asking the question is that a high proportion of the released energy is in the form of neutrinos, which are fairly useless at low tech levels.

I don't really know what question you're asking here.

Monopoles are topological solitons. Q-balls are non-topological solitons. Both catalyze proton decay, for example, via baryon number violation.

The typical decay products for a proton is an electron and a neutral pion, which promptly decays into 2 gammas. Charged particles and gammas are easy to harness (e.g. surround the reactor with water).

There are less likely decay chains involving neutral pions and muons, where the pions again produce gammas and the muons produce electrons, neutrinos, and antineutrinos. You can still recover energy from the gammas and electrons easily.

So the fraction of usable energy from a Q-ball is exactly the same as that from a non-intermediate mass GUT monopole, since they are the same mechanism.

However, it is easier to get a non-topological soliton than a topological soliton, and in turn it's easier to get a topological soliton from the conditions in the core of the non-topological one.

[Drashner1]

Hm. Based on this, it sounds like we could say that S2 create monopoles by first creating Qballs and then using them to create monopoles, which may be easier to 'breed' then create from scratch. Later, higher S-levels figure out how to mass produce Q balls and then form them into Q mirrors and such.

Does this work as a progression for this tech or do we need to tweak things a bit?

Todd

[Tachyon]

Hm. Based on this, it sounds like we could say that S2 create monopoles by first creating Qballs and then using them to create monopoles, which may be easier to 'breed' then create from scratch. Later, higher S-levels figure out how to mass produce Q balls and then form them into Q mirrors and such.

Does this work as a progression for this tech or do we need to tweak things a bit?

Todd

Yes, so:

First you make Q balls. Then you use the Q balls to make GUT monopoles. Both catalyze baryon decay, the difference being whether electrical or magnetic charge is handiest in the situation (or both if you make dyons).

Later, you figure out how to make intermediate mass monopoles, which does not produce baryon number violation, and so doesn't catalyze decay. This allows you to make monopolium steel and other ferromagnetic materials with a monopole substrate.

Still later, you figure out how to make intermediate mass monopoles with differing charges. This allows you to make full-on magmatter.

And because we always want to stomp all over those guys on StarDestroyer.net (kidding), we make the Q gun, which is a standard particle accelerator firing Q balls instead of charged particles.

The beam constantly converts matter of the opposite charge to energy, and if you use two beams, with positive and negative Q-balls in each, you can cause a continual reaction by eating both types of charged matter (e.g. the negative Q-balls catalyze protons, the positive Q-balls eat leptons and any leftover muons and electrons from hadron decay) and maybe cause a chain reaction ...

(To be clear, either charge of Q-ball will catalyze hadron and lepton decay, but normal matter will be strongly attracted to Q-balls of the opposite charge.)

Oh, kinda like the MDD "Little Doctor" in Ender's Game (which was a good movie adaptation of the book, BTW, IMHO).

Well, maybe not a chain reaction. But you can probably render anything made of normal matter into its equivalence in energy (and the positive Q balls will cut down the incidence of muon to neutrino decay). And the EM force is pretty long ranged, so matter is going to want to rush to the Q balls (rather than the reverse because Q balls are quite heavy compared to molecules and atoms), the reaction rate limited by the number of Q-balls and their effective charge (once their charge falls below a certain level, they stop violating baryon number in their cores).

Then again, maybe. ;-) About the only limitation on such a weapon are the number of Q balls you have on hand to fire, which mostly determines how quickly your target converts itself to energy and fragments.

BTW, this article http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464e89d70a038 is more plausibly explained using Q balls (strangelets aren't stable, and neutronium is really just a battery for gravitational energy).

Now to go off and figure out how to make stable strangelets.

[JohnnyYesterday]

Since Q-balls can have either a positive or negative charge, would it be possible to create "Q-matter" by having Q-ball "electrons" "orbiting" Q-ball "protons"?

Are there minimum and maximum possible masses for Q-balls (aside from the mass of the entire universe)?

If not, and if the answer to question one is yes, would it follow that incredibly low mass "elements" could be created? Incredibly massive? Weakly bonding? As strong as magmatter? High temperature superfluidity?

Assuming the Q-ball "electrons" have a negative charge, normal matter elements could touch Q-matter without ghosting through or being catalyzed?

[Drashner1]

Hmm. OA actually has a 'Disintegrator Weapon' in the EG - its described as a clarketech device and rare and probably wouldn't work. I think you've just come up with the basis for a rewrite of it. Although it sounds like it would probably be fairly common, at least among transapients. I'm not sure you actually want to give this sort of tech to modos without fairly strict restrictions. If at all. It might be up there with implosion weapons. Or at least displacement cannon. Something that is controlled in its use since the ability to vaporize virtually anything is probably not something we want the children playing with unsupervised.

Re the link you posted - I'll go in and clean up the article - haven't had a chance to look at it tonight but I'm gathering it mentions strangelets. Thought we'd got rid of all mention of those - pesky things. It's like whack a mole, I tell you

Todd

[Rynn]

Sounds cool I have a few simple questions;

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

- How could you (theoretically) make one?

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

- 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?

[Drashner1]

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