What comes into your mind when someone asks you, what is the strongest material in our universe? The answer to this question would be, the “Nuclear Pasta”. An astrophysicist at McGill University in Canada who studies neutron stars, Matt Caplan, told the Atlantic that nuclear pasta may be one of the strongest known materials in the universe. Its matter can be 10 billion times stronger than steel and a teaspoon of this would weigh 10 million tons, according to the calculations by a team of researchers affiliated with institutions in the U.S. and Canada.
Why does Nuclear Pasta exist? How does it work? Where does it come from? For years, scientists have been trying to answer these questions, but as of yet, they’ve reached no concrete conclusions. A team of physicists from the University of California Berkeley now think that Nuclear Pasta might just hold the key to understanding our universe and how it works.
Our universe is vast. The mind cannot comprehend its size, even with models and illustrations. It’s like trying to get ahold of something that won’t be held—the more you try, the more your grasp slips away until it seems entirely impossible to hold onto. To further complicate matters, we currently only understand 4% of our universe (25% if you count dark matter). And yet, scientists have discovered ways in which we may be able to see past our current limitations. One such way is through nuclear pasta, or nuclear pasta theory. This post will explore what nuclear pasta theory is and how it can help us better understand our universe.
The formation of this complex nonuniform phases of nuclear matter begins with a supernova. During a supernova, the core of a massive star undergoes an extraordinary transformation, form 1055 separate nuclei to a single gigantic nucleus that forms the proto-neutron star. The ultra-compact nature of neutron stars creates an unusual competition between the electrostatic and the nuclear forces. This competition allows for the complex neutron and protons assemblies that constitute nuclear pasta phases which occur at densities somewhat below nuclear saturation density. With matters below nuclear saturation density, it forms unusual structures with geometrical shapes that depend on temperature, proton fraction and density. Usually, atomic nuclei are roughly spherical in an ordinary matter, unlike in cores of supernovae and crusts of neutron stars, nuclei rearrange and adopt themselves into exotic shapes such as sheets, cylinders and others. The term “Nuclear Pasta” was passed on by scientists due to the resemblance of some of these shapes to various type of Italian pasta.
These pasta phases represent a unique environment that is not present on Earth and can’t be recreated in the laboratory. “By studying them, we can learn a variety of things, including how the core rotates in relation to crust,” said by a researcher Bastian Schütrumpf. “Our research can help, for instance, to explain why neutron stars rotate fast.”
To study the transitions between the different pasta shapes as the density of matter decreases from uniform to much lower densities where nuclei become spherical again, scientists relied on computer simulations of nuclear pasta since they have no way of creating neutron-star matter on Earth. They use molecular dynamics (MD) simulations containing 51200 nucleons, including protons and neutrons, the particles that make up atomic nuclei.
The existence of complex, disorderly nuclear pasta “may tell us the fate of the huge magnetic fields in neutron stars, which can be a trillion or more times stronger than the Earth’s field,” said lead study author Charles Horowitz, a physicist at Indiana University in Bloomington. “If the conductivity is low, the great electrical currents supporting the fields may dissipate in about a million years.”
