Q-balls

Q-Balls are a form of exotic matter, used in applications such as the manufacture of antimatter from matter. Like photons, they exhibit a particle/wave duality with soliton (solitary wave) behavior, maintaining shape while propagating at a constant velocity.

Q-Balls make up a portion of the dark matter of the universe, and are more common than natural cosmic monopoles. Galactic core emissions can be traced back to positronic annihilations generated from electron flux on primordial Q-balls. They are metastable, evaporating on timescales longer than the current age of the universe.

They might play a role in baryogenesis, i.e. the origin of the matter that fills the universe. The early universe may have had many energy lumps that consisted of Q-balls. When these eventually interacted with each other they dispersed, creating more matter particles than antimatter particles, explaining why matter predominates in the visible universe. When they "pop" or disperse they produce sound waves which act as a source for the ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves.

Several natural Q-forges exist in neutron stars that have captured relic Q-balls, which are naturally formed during the supersymmetric phase transitions that occurred as the universe cooled. In such systems, a single heavy Q-ball is calculated to be able to "eat" a neutron star in a few billion years, until the neutron star density becomes insufficient to maintain Fermi degeneracy. At this point, the neutrons revert to protons and electrons, and the neutron star explodes.

Antimatter production
A Q-Mirror consists of a disk of artificial Q-balls held in suspension. At sufficiently high energies, synthetic vacuum states are created that result in the generation of monopoles, Q-Balls, or other forms of exotic matter. Mirrors are surrounded by a containment frame that maintains the stability of the Q-ball structure, and a frame (composed of magmatter components and devices) that allows control of the entire mirror assembly. This results in an efficient operation in a high energy environment of a space drive or reactor core. Any form of baryonic matter that comes into contact with a Q-Mirror is 'reflected' as its antimatter equivalent (and vice-versa) with 100% efficiency and zero energy expenditure.

As a side effect of the conversion of matter to antimatter via Q-ball reflection, Q-balls absorb the baryon number of each particle they interact with and store this energy in the zero point field of the vacuum. Each Q-ball converts its protons of matter (around 8x106kg) to antimatter (with an energy equivalent of around 1023 Joules) before reaching 'Q-crit' at which point the maximum amount of energy that can be stored in the basic vacuum states associated with the Q-ball is reached. A maximally charged Q-ball storing 8000 tons of matter has a mass-energy equivalence of only 31.46 grams. At this point the Q-ball is considered to be 'depleted' and will cease to convert matter into antimatter.

Industrial uses for the future
A Type II civilization would typically employ a Q-battery that allows the extraction and manipulation of the stored vacuum energy contained in depleted Q-balls. Large, industrial scale Q-mirrors can be used to convert large quantities of matter to antimatter - sometimes billions of tons at a time - and then be rapidly converted into large numbers of extremely compact and powerful energy sources for use in spaceships, world destroying weapons, conversion drives and reactors, imaging, stellar modification systems, etc.

With a Type III civilization, the technology of Q-batteries advances considerably. The limitations of Q-crit are removed and the storage potential of each Q-ball increases massively, up to a level of some 40M (solar masses) - referred to as 'Q-black hole'. This, combined with both improved methods for managing matter-Q-ball interactions and the construction of Q-mirrors durable enough to convert medium mass astrophysical bodies (brown dwarves, M-class suns, white dwarves, and neutron stars) into antimatter leads to a number of new applications such as "singularity seeds" which are able to conjure instant mass out of nowhere. This leads to exotic weapons such as black hole bombs and wormhole imploders.

A Type IV or Type Omega civilization would be able to manipulate the vacuum energy associated with a Q-ball without that energy radiating away into the surrounding environment. In effect, it becomes possible to increase or decrease the apparent mass of the Q-ball in a controlled manner and hold that modified mass stable indefinitely. This, particularly when combined with Halo technology, leads to such advances as variable mass Halo swarms, and 'virtual singularities' - points of increased apparent mass, and therefore gravity.