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I had this idea a few days ago that the Higgs event might have been a naked singularity, i.e. the colliding protons (very briefly) fall into a state of infinite density and release two gamma-ray photons as decay products. One thing led to another, and I was led to extrapolate that perhaps atomic nuclei can be seen as something akin to quark-gluon plasmas; that is, we tend to think of them as bundles of protons and neutrons, but how often do we really observe nuclei directly (hydrogen nuclei don't count)? Wouldn't quantum mechanics imply that all the 'protons' and 'neutrons' are sort of smeared into one another? And, if so, would that not therefore be a quark-gluon plasma? Wouldn't these rigid categories of 'proton' and 'neutron' have somewhat limited applicability in the nuclear setting? Building on that, I thought perhaps it's possible to thereby imagine a black hole as a sort of giant nucleus, and that the difference between neutron stars and black holes is that one passes the Chandrasekhar limit, forcing this lattice of neutrons and electrons to form around the QGP, whereas in the black hole setting everything collapses into QGP and it forms an event horizon. Does this seem likely?

Sam Cottle
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The answer is probably "not for long". When a star collapses the components get squeezed together and the temperature increases, plausibly turning into a quark-gluon plasma... but this does not stop the collapse. Very quickly (from the perspective of an observer falling with the matter) it reaches the singularity and stops being anything we know anything about.

There seems to be an implicit assumption in the question that the plasma can resist the collapse. This is not true, due to Buchdahl's theorem: you cannot have a hydrostatic equilibrium for a radius below $(9/8)R_S$ with finite central pressure.

Anders Sandberg
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1/2 spin particles like quarks are subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. Therefore they cannot contract down to a singularity. However gluons are spin 1 particles and therefore not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. Thus it could be possible that the singularity in a black hole is made solely of gluons. Physicist John Wheeler, who coined the term black hole, believed that an imploding star converts its protons and neutrons into radiation during the black hole formation. Thus this is a real possibility.

foolishmuse
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