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mrguyorama12/09/20242 repliesview on HN

It decays in under a nanosecond. A reality of all exotic matter research is that it is exotic almost always because it cannot exist in a stable manner for longer than a second.

The vast majority of applications, if any, will be extremely niche sensing applications. They are useful to further probe the edges of our knowledge of physics and look at the corner cases where our models give confused shrugs and odd answers.

It's not going to power a warp drive.


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pfdietz12/09/2024

There has been an idea that quark matter with roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks could be absolutely stable, the ground state of nuclear matter. Ordinary charged nuclear matter would be inhibited from converting to it (or being absorbed into it) by a strong potential barrier at its surface. However, if this were true neutron stars would actually be quark stars. There is some evidence that this isn't so, so the theory is not held to be very likely these days.