1

I had this idea a few days ago that the Higgs event might have been a naked singularity, i.e. the colliding protons (very briefly) fall into a state of infinite density and release two gamma-ray photons as decay products. One thing led to another, and I was led to extrapolate that perhaps atomic nuclei can be seen as something akin to quark-gluon plasmas; that is, we tend to think of them as bundles of protons and neutrons, but how often do we really observe nuclei directly (hydrogen nuclei don't count)? Wouldn't quantum mechanics imply that all the 'protons' and 'neutrons' are sort of smeared into one another? And, if so, would that not therefore be a quark-gluon plasma? Wouldn't these rigid categories of 'proton' and 'neutron' have somewhat limited applicability in the nuclear setting? Building on that, I thought perhaps it's possible to thereby imagine a black hole as a sort of giant nucleus, and that the difference between neutron stars and black holes is that one passes the Chandrasekhar limit, forcing this lattice of neutrons and electrons to form around the QGP, whereas in the black hole setting everything collapses into QGP and it forms an event horizon. Does this seem likely?

Sam Cottle
  • 1,544
  • Quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is different from hadron gas (or liquid) because there is the deconfinement transition in between, which is probably first-order. Therefore, atomic nuclei are not QGP droplets, see https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/13581/226902 – Quillo Mar 02 '22 at 12:47
  • Related/duplicate: "can Quark Stars form under event horizon?" https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/524720/226902 Moreover, degenerate stars made of deconfined quarks are just quark stars (or hybrid neutron-quark stars, where there is a deconfinement transition in the inner core)... not black holes. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_star – Quillo Mar 02 '22 at 12:49
  • 1
    This wouldn't work if the source material weren't baryonic; therefore, it shouldn't work even if it is, because composition is irrelevant. (More precisely, no external observation can support your model, unless the assumed matter fields or spacetime geometry are sufficiently unusual.) – J.G. Mar 02 '22 at 12:49
  • "hydrogen nuclei don't count" - you already created an exception that makes all the rest pointless. – gbon Mar 02 '22 at 12:52
  • No I didn't, think. – Sam Cottle Mar 02 '22 at 12:56
  • Ok, perhaps a better way of phrasing that would be: do you not think a proton could be characterised as quark-gluon plasma? – Sam Cottle Mar 02 '22 at 12:57
  • 1
    @SamCottle no, see the first comment. – fqq Mar 02 '22 at 13:12

2 Answers2

2

The answer is probably "not for long". When a star collapses the components get squeezed together and the temperature increases, plausibly turning into a quark-gluon plasma... but this does not stop the collapse. Very quickly (from the perspective of an observer falling with the matter) it reaches the singularity and stops being anything we know anything about.

There seems to be an implicit assumption in the question that the plasma can resist the collapse. This is not true, due to Buchdahl's theorem: you cannot have a hydrostatic equilibrium for a radius below $(9/8)R_S$ with finite central pressure.

Anders Sandberg
  • 32,067
-1

1/2 spin particles like quarks are subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. Therefore they cannot contract down to a singularity. However gluons are spin 1 particles and therefore not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. Thus it could be possible that the singularity in a black hole is made solely of gluons. Physicist John Wheeler, who coined the term black hole, believed that an imploding star converts its protons and neutrons into radiation during the black hole formation. Thus this is a real possibility.

foolishmuse
  • 4,551
  • Is there any published paper that actually supports this? I have not seen anybody claim singularities are made of gluons. – Anders Sandberg Mar 02 '22 at 16:49
  • Does seem wrong. In a singularity the steepness of the potential well constraining the gluons would be so great that to expect that those distorted wave functions behvave like gluons would be literally stretching it. An answer and a joke. – JMLCarter Mar 02 '22 at 16:58
  • @AndersSandberg No paper on this (other than my own). But it does provide a somewhat reasonable answer to the OP about a quark gluon plasma. As I said in the answer, it is a possibility. – foolishmuse Mar 02 '22 at 21:25
  • @foolishmuse - I don't think this is a possibility. Remember that locally the singularity is a spacelike structure, so the gluons cannot make it up any more than copper atoms could make up 11:00 AM. – Anders Sandberg Mar 02 '22 at 22:09