Humanity is missing, luckily I have billions of clones.

Chapter 229 Feasibility

Li Qingsong named this proton decay product particle "photon", which means a tiny particle similar to a photon.

Particles like photoneutrinos can bring about all kinds of negative states, and even Li Qingsong couldn't find a suitable detection method for a while.

Due to the extremely long lifetime of protons, the density of photoneutrinos in the universe is even lower than that of magnetic monopoles. Detecting magnetic monopoles is already so difficult, so do we have to build hundreds of thousands of similar detectors to try to capture photoneutrinos?
The project was so huge that even Li Qingsong couldn't bear it.

A more critical question is how other ordinary electroweak civilizations accomplish the detection of photoneutrinos?
They can't do it by building hundreds of thousands of detectors.

Even Li Qingsong doesn't have this industrial strength, how could they have it?

This means that there must be another way to detect photon particles with a smaller investment of industrial resources.

But...what's the solution?
Li Qingsong fell into a long period of contemplation. Not only Li Qingsong, but also the Blueprint scientists joined in the task of thinking and exploring.

Time passed quietly, and Li Qingsong's theoretical breakthroughs continued without stopping.

There are small branches of scientific theories within the framework of various large theories, or breakthroughs in mathematics, etc., almost every day.

They are like flesh and blood, attaching themselves little by little to the "skeleton" of the theoretical framework established by Li Qingsong, making this framework more and more perfect.

But unfortunately, there is still a blank in the knowledge about proton decay.

Even the skeleton has not been successfully established, let alone flesh and blood.

Li Qingsong had no choice but to persist day after day and think about it year after year.

This is true of scientific research, especially basic theoretical research. There are no shortcuts; it can only be achieved through gradual progress, step by step. By accumulating little by little, we seek the potential for breakthrough theories.

It was under such circumstances that one day, an inconspicuous breakthrough caught Li Qingsong's attention.

This is not a breakthrough at the basic theoretical level, but should be considered a branch discovery.

This breakthrough concerns the cores of gas giant planets. Building on previous theoretical and mathematical advances, Li Qingsong completed a new modeling effort for the cores of gas giant planets. Using more parameters and greater computing power, he achieved a more realistic simulation of the core's operating mechanisms, providing theoretical support for understanding gas convection and variations in atmospheric element abundance.

This means that Li Qingsong is now able to make predictions about weather changes on gas giant planets with a high degree of accuracy.

This seems to have nothing to do with proton decay, but it gave Li Qingsong an inspiration.

He discovered that the cores of gas giants...seemed to have some potential as scientific research sites.

A typical gas giant planet, such as Jupiter in the solar system, is divided into four parts from the outside to the inside: the outer atmosphere, the supercritical fluid molecular hydrogen layer, the liquid metallic hydrogen layer, and the core.

The outer atmosphere is about one thousand kilometers thick. From the outside to the inside, the pressure and temperature increase rapidly until the pressure and temperature are high enough, and the hydrogen element enters the supercritical fluid state.

The pressure in this place exceeds 10,000 Earth atmospheres and the temperature reaches thousands of degrees Celsius.

Going further, at a distance of about 20,000 kilometers from the surface, the state of hydrogen changed again.

They became liquid metallic hydrogen.

Because the pressure and temperature are too high, the electrons of the hydrogen atoms have separated from the nucleus and become free electrons, which have metal-like properties, so they are called metallic hydrogen.

The atmospheric pressure in this part is millions of times that of the Earth, and the temperature is as high as tens of thousands of degrees Celsius. Further inward, to the innermost part of the gas giant planet, is a solid core similar to that of the Earth, mainly composed of iron, nickel, and silicate rocks.

In the early stages of planet formation, there was actually no difference between gas giants and rocky planets, except that one was bigger and the other was smaller.

A planet the size of Earth would only be able to absorb as much gas as the Earth's atmosphere, and would eventually become a rocky planet.

But when its mass reaches two or three times that of the Earth, it can absorb more gas and eventually evolve into a gas giant planet similar to Jupiter.

Based on simulation models, Li Qingsong discovered that a place with potential for scientific research environment is the liquid metallic hydrogen layer of a gas giant planet.

The reason why it has a scientific research environment is that Li Qingsong calculated that it is possible to find key evidence of proton decay there!

This is of course not looking for evidence through photoneutrino detection, but through another mode.

The liquid metallic hydrogen layer of a gas giant planet has extremely high pressure and extremely high material density.

Proton decay causes protons to turn into photons and escape from the core of gas giant planets.

The process is similar to a person squeezing a spring with all his strength, only to have the spring suddenly disappear.

Apparently, the person would slam down on the ground, thus causing the "shock."

Normally, this vibration is extremely small because the probability of a proton decaying is extremely low.

However, there are many gas giant planets in the Pegasus V432 system, and the smallest one has a mass about 1.2 times that of Jupiter.

The pressure there is extremely high, just like a person squeezing a "spring" with great force.

This mechanism amplifies the tiny vibrations caused by proton decay.

According to Li Qingsong's estimate, the total mass of its liquid metallic hydrogen layer is about 0.9 times the mass of Jupiter, and the number of protons is about 10^54.

Existing evidence suggests that the lifetime of a proton is 10^37 years.

Calculated in this way, on average, about 10^17 protons decay in the liquid metal layer of this gas giant every year, and on average, about 32 billion protons decay every second.

In the liquid metallic hydrogen layer with extremely high pressure, protons themselves play the role of supporting the material structure, just like small springs.

Every second, about 32 billion of these small springs suddenly disappear, and the surrounding matter suddenly loses its support, causing that kind of "vibration".

So...is it possible to prove the existence of proton decay and study the process of proton decay by detecting this "vibration"?

Li Qingsong was not sure whether this detection path would work.

After all, 32 billion protons may sound like a lot, but in reality their total mass is not even as much as that of a virus.

Is it really possible to observe the "vibration" caused by such a tiny mass loss?

Intuitively, Li Qingsong felt it was unlikely. But since there seemed to be no other solution at this stage, he decided to explore and verify its feasibility.

(End of this chapter)