🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan9.043932.11081@ee.ubc.ca> davem@ee.ubc.ca (Dave Michelson) writes:
>"There appears to be only one weak link in the whole enterprise: no one has 
>yet found isolated free quarks!"

[...]

>At present, theorists conjecture that quarks are confined in colourless 
>clusters (hadrons) but this has not been *proved*.  It seems possible that
>free quarks may exist.

Possible, but *extremely* unlikely. Basically *all* experimental
evidence points toward confinement; there are only a handful of
experiments that seem to indicate free quarks, but so far none of
these have been repeated. 

And as a QCD theorist, I strongly object to the word "conjecture"
above; even though it's not been proved yet, confinement is _much_
more than mere conjecture. 

What is more interesting is the possibility of having charged,
meta-stable particles of more exotic kinds, such as "strangelets"
(colour-neutral lumps of large number of s quarks), supersymmetric
particles, and so on.

The word meta-stable means that the particles don't really have to be
stable to catalyze fusion. I don't know the latest status of
muon-catalyzed fusion, but muons may be just long-lived enought to do
it. 

              Magnus Olsson                | \e+      /_
    Department of Theoretical Physics      |  \  Z   / q
        University of Lund, Sweden         |   >----<           
 magnus@thep.lu.se, thepmo@seldc52.bitnet  |  /      \===== g
PGP key available via finger or on request | /e-      \q