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Topic: super heavy fusion  (Read 8041 times)

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Offline phyzkid92

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super heavy fusion
« on: February 02, 2009, 09:17:23 PM »
Is it possible to fuse to superheavy elements. If that were the case would it release more energy the Hydrogen fusion?

Offline Peisander

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Re: super heavy fusion
« Reply #1 on: September 14, 2010, 07:58:12 PM »
No as far as I am aware. The work of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in 1938 determined that Uranium was about the breaking point of stable atoms.

Hahn was particularly clueless, or lacking insight, so he relied very heavily upon Meitner to figure out matters which baffled him. So much so, that when she being Jewish fled to Stockholm and Hahn continued their experiments and quizzed her by air mail. There was a particularly fast overnight mail service throughout the war. British MI5 capitalised on this relationship to learn through hahn about Nazi nuclear progress.

Back to the topic, Meitner theorised to Hahn that an atom was like a water droplet where if one kept adding to the nucleus at some point it would get too big and begin to wobble and finally burst. She said this bursting was like losing surface tension.

As it burst of course it would form two smaller droplets so if this reasoning is correct then there seems little opportunity for heavy fusion.

Stars are the primary example of a fusion reaction. As stars burn up Hydrogen and start to consume Helium, the heat released appears to dwindle. I can only add that there don't seem to be any stars observed burning Uranium in fusion reactions.     

Offline zaphraud

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Re: super heavy fusion
« Reply #2 on: July 31, 2011, 06:23:06 PM »
isn't this the purpose of the large hadron collider?

Offline gippgig

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Re: super heavy fusion
« Reply #3 on: July 31, 2011, 09:16:15 PM »
The LHC primarily collides protons with protons. I believe there was a run with lead ions but I don't think anything heavier is being considered. Note that the energy used is far too high to result in fusion. Also note that fusing superheavy nuclei would absorb rather than give off energy - the products are less stable than the starting materials (peak stability occurs around iron).

Offline Enthalpy

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Re: super heavy fusion
« Reply #4 on: May 03, 2012, 07:12:11 PM »
The LHC has run with lead ions. Purpose is to produce many baryon collisions within a small volume to observe a "quark soup", which did succeed better than expected and needs an explanation.

You guess that a "quark soup" is the exact opposite of constructing delicately a heavier nucleus. Already the energy, near 10TeV versus 200*1GeV for the mass of each lead atom, tell that the guys there are destructors instead.

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