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I have seen videos online about how dangerous strange matter is... which is something I have never understood since strange matter created in a lab always disappears very quickly. However I watched a video today about the continent of stability at around 300 daltons. At 315, the protons and neutrons break down into $u$ and $d$ quarks, making the nucleus free quarks... Supposedly any matter that touches this atom breaks down into $u$ and $d$ quarks and is added to the nucleus. Also supposedly this matter is stable at room temps and pressures.

I cannot find the paper online to support this.... Has anyone read this paper and if so, what are your thoughts?

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    $\begingroup$ You never find a single quark all by itself (Not counting truly extreme Big Bang temperatures). They always occur in pairs or triplets. See these old Veritasium videos - Empty Space is NOT Empty and Your Mass is NOT From the Higgs Boson $\endgroup$
    – mmesser314
    Commented May 28, 2021 at 1:27
  • $\begingroup$ Supposedly in UD matter that nucleus is so dense that the protons and neutrons break down into just quarks with electrons orbiting them. This is why the call UD matter room temp stable quark matter... $\endgroup$
    – Rick
    Commented May 29, 2021 at 11:00
  • $\begingroup$ The paper is also available on arxiv: Quark matter may not be strange $\endgroup$
    – Thomas Fritsch
    Commented May 29, 2021 at 12:09

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Once formed, the danger of $ud$ Quark Matter ($ud$QM) is probably comparable to that of strange quark matter (SQM). Quoting from the original paper on "Quark Matter May Not Be Strange":

As with SQM, the further injection of neutrons (or heavy ions) can cause the piece of udQM to grow with the release of an indefinite amount of energy.

What might be potentially riskier is that it may be easier to create $ud$ quark matter than strange quark matter. As noted in the article, with $ud$QM:

A faster catastrophic conversion could occur …

it raises the hope to produce this new form of stable matter by the fusion of heavy elements. With no strangeness to produce, this may be an easier task than producing SQM.

If produced, however, it is thought that either SQM or $ud$QM would likely be positively charged. This is safer since the quark matter would electrostatically repel atomic nuclei making runaway absorption of normal matter unlikely. The "Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions" discusses how the risks of quark matter production (or other catastrophes) are negligible for current accelerators.

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A basic search on "Stable quark matter" turns up a reputable non-specialist (but not exactly layman) article: https://phys.org/news/2018-06-periodic-table.html

Per the article, the idea is that at around $A=300$, nucleons no longer remain separate and the matter becomes up and down quarks, contained within some volume ($\approx \pm 5\,$)fm.

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    $\begingroup$ Not sure though this is really a good answer. The question is not asking what the u/d quark matter is, but whether that, if it were produced, these ultra heavy u/d quark nuclei would begin to "feed" on surrounding ordinary nuclear matter, spontaneously converting it into this more stable form, in a manner analogous to the once-posited and feared "Ice-9 Type Transition" involving believed-stable nuggets of strange-quark matter. $\endgroup$
    – The_Sympathizer
    Commented Aug 10, 2021 at 1:35
  • $\begingroup$ But yes, the idea behind it is that, in effect the nucleus "melts", becoming a liquid, unstructured blob of quarks, and that this quark liquid is more stable than a differentiated aggregate of nucleons. $\endgroup$
    – The_Sympathizer
    Commented Aug 10, 2021 at 1:36

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