Is a quark bomb possible? I am wondering about the possibility of making a bomb out of the binding energy of quarks inside hadrons. I know that about confinement and all that, but I wonder if there is a way to harness this energy. If so, how much more energetic is this bomb expected to be?
 A: There is actually a theory that some neutron stars are actually strange stars, that is made up of a soup of strange, up and down quarks. Simulations using the equations of state for both neutrons (having only up and down) and strange matter (a soup of up and down and strange quarks) show that transforming nuclear matter into strange matter is exothermic, and once it starts at the core of a neutron it deflagrates the entire star. The total energy is very close to that of a supernova explosion, so some theories state that the detonation of a supernova is partially a result of this deflagration that transforms into a detonation. I do not think that similar conditions to start the change of phase can be reached here on Earth. I do not mean strangelets that eat the world, but high enough density conditions that result  in a release of energy larger that the one used to create the dense core (same problem than with nuclear fusion).  But we should have to wait for an expert's answer.
A: Consider an UHECR neutron approaching a magnetar. The Lorentz force acting on the quarks will soon exceed the QCD string tension, at that point quark anti-quark pairs get created giving rise to pions. These pions in turn get polarized and you get more pions. So, you basically get a chain reaction yielding more and more pions until the speed of the pions becomes too slow for this process to proceed further. 
