Stephen Brooks 🦆Mar 3
I noticed before that you can approach the nuclear density by taking an ultra-cold Coulomb crystal, putting it through a TeV-scale particle accelerator and the focussing it to an extremely small spot. But does anything interesting happen with a slightly smaller accelerator? It turns out that pair-wise nuclear interactions within the imploding beam are joined by 3-way and 4-way ones as energy and density increase.
Show threadStephen Brooks 🦆
Depending on how stable the intermediate products are, you can also get chained collisions within the bunch diameter. #physics #accelerators
3-way collisions are usually only seen inside the cores of stars and, if there are super-heavy elements yet to be found, this may be a way of making them.
Mar 3 at 10:55pmWeb
Show threadStephen Brooks 🦆Mar 7
To approximate the expected number of multi-way collisions, I used a simple physical model where nuclei are spheres with density 2.5e17 kg/m^3 and they interact if the centre of one goes within another. Then in the code below I work out a "volume fraction" of the focal ellipsoid that is filled and an "area fraction" that is filled in 2D projection seen from the side with largest area.
#accelerators #physics
Show threadStephen Brooks 🦆Mar 7
2-way collisions are expected to occur N*Afrac times and this matches the traditional luminosity formula if you expand it out. True 3-way collisions require an additional factor of Vfrac to get the 3rd nucleus exactly where you want it at that instant, whereas chained 3-way collisons (two consecutive collisions within the focal point) require only a factor of Afrac, which is larger.
Show threadStephen Brooks 🦆Mar 7
This gave the graphs in my previous post. The numbers behave similarly with a small shift for different nuclei although I used calcium as a mid-Z choice. Things like the D-T resonance are not included!