What is better than antimatter rocket? Barionic desintegration rocket.

[Angeltxilon]

Well, I started this topic with little details, but I hope, the enough to can discuss.

Recently I found a strange hypothetical rocket concept: a barionic desintegration rocket.

What does this have to special?
A barionic desintegration rocket (also named catalized proton-desintegration rocket), would be very similar to antimatter rocket in thrust and isp, but would not require of antimatter.
This type of spaceship propulsion would be based in the hypothetical desintegration of proton, doing use of hypothetical particles (like magnetic monopoles, Higgs bosons, and X-Y bosons) like catalyst. These particles are not consumed in the reaction, and should be stable (in the case of magnetic monopoles).

What are the problems?
The problems of this propulsion method, are the same of antimatter rocket problems in beginning, related with radiation.
There has more problems, like:
- It needs the existence of hypothetical particles, related with hypothesis of big unification (electroweak-strong force).
- The matter must be ionized without electrons and suffer a big pressure to can react with the catalyst, like with the fusion in fusion rocket engines.
- The hypothetical particles would be extremely strange and difficult to obtain in the nature, or need extremely big energies to be produced (and is required lots of these), being more expensive than antimatter (millions of times).

What are the advantages?
- It does not requires advanced containers, removing useless mass.
- It can work with any collected barionic particle of space environment, without require extra strange particles (due that catalysts are reusable);
this mean the possibility of obtain extremely powerful Bussard ramjets, based in total conversion of matter in energy instead nuclear fusion.

Mechanism:
The rocket is based in the proton decay.

p+

→

e+

+

π

>Barionic-leptonic number is conserved and exchanged by relation of forces (strong-electroweak).<
The problem is that, if this is possible, one proton will take 6.6x10^33 years to decay.
Magnetic monopoles and others particles can accelerate the process until very little times of femtoseconds.

 

The debate begins.

Edited April 19, 2016 by Angeltxilon

[Steel]

Well I can see a few problems, first of which is that it relies on a unification theory that may not even turn out to exist. Secondly these exotic particles that are needed likely only exist on their own for tiny fractions of nanoseconds as a result of high energy collisions and are thus probably not a reliable source of catalysis for this reaction, and probably also rule out your "no advance containers" advantage

Edited April 18, 2016 by Steel

[KSK]

I'm bowing out. There's a couple too many hypotheticals in here for me, and I lack the physics to discuss them in any sort of meaningful manner. 

Have fun with the debate.

 

[Angeltxilon]

5 minutes ago, Steel said:

Well I can see a few problems, first of which is that it relies on a unification theory that may not even turn out to exist. Secondly these exotic particles that are needed likely only exist on their own for tiny fractions of nanoseconds as a result of high energy collisions and are thus probably not a reliable source of catalysis for this reaction, and probably also rule out your "no advance containers" advantage

Magnetic monopoles are present in lots of hypothesis (not only one), and in hypothesis should have stable subtypes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole

[magnemoe]

Anvil of stars used this, made for very high dV on close to lightspeed ships. 
However they was messing with the bit state of matter, the hypothetical level below quarks, making it almost as realistic as star-trek, grand strategy was less realistic
 

[PB666]

4 hours ago, Angeltxilon said:

Well, I started this topic with little details, but I hope, the enough to can discuss.

Recently I found a strange hypothetical rocket concept: a barionic desintegration rocket.

What does this have to special?
A barionic desintegration rocket (also named catalized proton-desintegration rocket), would be very similar to antimatter rocket in thrust and isp, but would not require of antimatter.
This type of spaceship propulsion would be based in the hypothetical desintegration of proton, doing use of hypothetical particles (like magnetic monopoles, Higgs bosons, and X-Y bosons) like catalyst. These particles are not consumed in the reaction, and should be stable (in the case of magnetic monopoles).

What are the problems?
The problems of this propulsion method, are the same of antimatter rocket problems in beginning, related with radiation.
There has more problems, like:
- It needs the existence of hypothetical particles, related with hypothesis of big unification (electroweak-strong force).
- The matter must be ionized without electrons and suffer a big pressure to can react with the catalyst, like with the fusion in fusion rocket engines.
- The hypothetical particles would be extremely strange and difficult to obtain in the nature, or need extremely big energies to be produced (and is required lots of these), being more expensive than antimatter (millions of times).

What are the advantages?
- It does not requires advanced containers, removing useless mass.
- It can work with any collected barionic particle of space environment, without require extra strange particles (due that catalysts are reusable);
this mean the possibility of obtain extremely powerful Bussard ramjets, based in total conversion of matter in energy instead nuclear fusion.

 

The debate begins.

What debate your concept is fail from the get-go.

hmm lets see you need 126 GeV and a massive superconducting supercollider to generate a higgs, but you get the energy out of one proton annihilation.
E = mc^2, a proton 0.931GeV. If you had the energy to annihilate a photon with a Higgs, you could simply have a photon rocket it would be tremendously more energy efficient. 

The problem with these methods is that just as when creating anti-matter/matter, you have to have energy to create highly energetic unstable matter (go - figure that) that hence gives you back less energy than you put into it.

Fundamentally energy mass equivalence places restrictions on these types of devices, before you can posit their use, you first have to define where your energy comes from.

[Snark]

Also, things can't just "disintegrate." There are conservation laws.  For example, you can't destroy a particle with a positive charge unless you also destroy a particle of equivalent negative charge, because electric charge is conserved.  That's just one example, there are plenty of other conserved quantities besides electric charge.

Matter requires antimatter to annihilate precisely because that's the only way to satisfy all the conservation laws involved.

So if you're making a proton go away... it has to be reacting with something.  And if that something has all of the necessary equal and opposite characteristics to satisfy all the conservation laws and allow it to annihilate a proton, then that pretty much makes it an anti-proton by definition.

Unless you're suggesting a process in which we can somehow repeal all those pesky conservation laws, but in that case essentially what you're saying is "imagine it's magic and the universe can do whatever I want it to do," in which case it might make a fun piece of fiction but isn't really something it's possible to hold a logical debate about.

[Angeltxilon]

2 hours ago, Snark said:

Also, things can't just "disintegrate." There are conservation laws. 

And the major part of hypothesis to unificate strong force and electroweak, suggest natural mechanisms to "violate" these conservation laws (better said, exchange these), related with the hypothetical proton decay.

 

p+  →  e+  +  π

e+ + e^-  → 2y

π → 2y

Strong force and electroweak unification implies that the barionic number can be exchanged with the leptonic number.

The basis of think in proton decay is, if protons does not decays, these violate thermodynamic laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay

Edited April 19, 2016 by Angeltxilon

[K^2]

The only thing that suggests proton decay as an actual thing is Supersymmetry and some branches of String Theory. None of the other predictions from either have panned out. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.

While people are still doing experiments trying to detect finite lifetime of a proton, absolutely everything points to it being a stable particle. Which means catalyst or not, it's not going to decay.

The fact that it is so does point to some very interesting broken symmetries, and some people get really upset when a fundamental symmetry is broken without an obvious reason, but just because you want an unbroken fundamental symmetry doesn't make it be so.