Comment by nimish
3 years ago
Also virtual particles don't make sense in a non-perturbative regime like room-temp protons, since they are an aid to understanding terms in the perturbation series expansion.
Not sure how they even apply in the case where Feynman diagrams aren't applicable. Hell, the calculations likely use lattice QCD which eschews them entirely!
Protons are non-perturbative, indeed, but this does not mean that there are no virtual particles exchanged inside a proton. It seems like your comment implies that, sorry if I misunderstood.
On the contrary, this means that there are too many virtual particles (gluons) being exchanged inside a proton, so many that perturbation theory is not applicable.
Virtual particles are part of an indexing scheme for perturbation series - saying that you leave the perturbative regime when you have "too many" of them is like saying that crystalline solids melt when they have too many normal modes.
Finally an analogy where I understand neither comparison :)
Are gluons virtual? (Or are they virtual inside a proton?)
Your question is can be posed as “is there a well-behaved resonance of the gluon field in a proton, that lasts long enough for it to be identified”. It's kinda like identifying a bubble in a pot of cold water vs a pot just starting to boil vs a rolling boil.
Gluons are real.
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