On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 09:53:55PM -0700, xxxxxx@shadowgard.com wrote:
> BTW, with the "neutronium" blades, I think a nuclear damper would
> prevent the decay.

Yes, so a neutron gas in a nuclear damper could well be stable.  It
won't ever form a liquid or solid, though, since neutrons don't form
bound states with each other - the strong force primarily applies
between nucleons with the same spin, and Pauli exclusion prevents such
pairs from getting close enough to each other.

Being unbound and repelling at extremely short range, what you get
would be essentially a gas: except it would be a gas that is freely
absorbed into ordinary matter, making it strongly radioactive once it
leaves the field.  Some sort of force field would be required to
contain the gas.  At some point though the question arises of why not
just use a shaped force field to cut stuff and hang the neutronium
which is proving more of a nuisance than it's worth.

On the other hand, the balance between Pauli repulsion and strong
force attraction is very fine.  If nuclear dampers shifted the
parameters of the strong nuclear force even a little, neutrons could
attract each other slightly instead of repelling.  Given the energies
involved, such neutronium would certainly be a solid at temperatures
found in the cores of most stars, and ridiculously dense.  What
happens if the damping field is ever switched off is still essentially
"nuclear explosion", though.

One interesting possibility arises if the field is generated by a
device made out of something like neutronium itself.  It would be
nearly indestructible by ordinary means, microscopic, and it would
only need to be extremely short-ranged: enough to encompass the
minutely thin slivers traces of neutronium.  They would have to be so
thin, else the mass would be prohibitive.

- Tim