I noticed before that you can approach the nuclear density by taking an ultra-cold Coulomb crystal, putting it through a TeV-scale particle accelerator and then focussing it to an extremely small spot.   But does anything interesting happen with a slightly smaller accelerator?   It turns out that pair-wise nuclear interactions within the imploding beam are joined by 3-way and 4-way ones as  energy and density increase.   Depending on how stable the intermediate products are, you can also get chained collisions within the bunch diameter.   #physics #accelerators 
<br />3-way collisions are usually only seen inside the cores of stars and, if there are super-heavy elements yet to be found, this may be a way of making them.<p><a href='posts/202603/post-20260303-220543-a.png'><img src='posts/202603/post-20260303-220543-a.png' loading='lazy' /></a></p>