The... theoretical matter - Strange and Charmed.

[howlingmadpanda]

Recently I was playing a video game called "minecraft" with a modpack called "voltz" I noticed in this modpack there was a thing called strange matter, thinking nothing of it I went on playing, but one night I started to think "Well hey there is the Strange quark, so could strange matter possibly be real?" , Well I did some research and learned it is possible that it is real and could possibly be found in neutron stars. Now what strange matter is for those of you who don't know is rather than typical matter (Up and down quarks) it could be made of Strange, Up and Down quarks. Personally with me being a minor I do believe we could see artificial production of this within my lifetime. I also started to think "If Strange matter theoretically could be real, then couldn't charmed matter" My belief is that charmed matter would be similar to strange matter just replacing the Strange quarks with charmed quarks. Any thoughts on these theoretical types of matter? (Please do not post about Dark Matter,I really don't care if it is theoretical speak about if else where, that's for another post

[ajb]

Strange matter, a form of quark matter consisting of up, down, and strange quarks may exist at the extreme pressures and densities found in the cores of neutron stars. Have a look at the Wikipedia page here.

At high enough pressures and densities it maybe possible that charmed matter can exists and be stable. However, all this is in the region of extreme QCD and the physics is still be probed.

People are interested in what we call quark matter, that is matter in which the fundamental degrees of freedom are quarks and gluons. Again this is rather theoretical and a difficult area of physics. The problem is that this region of QED is far from the asymptotically free region where perturbation theory works well. Instead people need non-perturbative methods, like lattice gauge theory which require large computers to solve the equations.

There are forms of a QCD phase diagram that give expected new phases of matter. Right now I would view this will a little caution.

Simon Hands [1] wrote an article aimed at final year undergraduate students in physics about the phase diagram of QCD. It maybe of some interest to you.

Reference
[1] Simon Hands, The Phase Diagram of QCD, Contemp.Phys. 42:209-225,2001. (arXiv:physics/0105022 [physics.ed-ph])

Edited April 15, 2013 by ajb

[howlingmadpanda]

Thank you, was wondering about quark matter