Comment by simonh
3 years ago
Looks like it, quarks are bound together by gluons so as you go up the energy scale and 'see' more quarks the gluon energies dominate. In fact about 99% of the Proton's mass is in the form of this binding energy.
3 years ago
Looks like it, quarks are bound together by gluons so as you go up the energy scale and 'see' more quarks the gluon energies dominate. In fact about 99% of the Proton's mass is in the form of this binding energy.
Binding energy is not gluons. Gluons are massless, binding energy is just energy, it's not a particle.
I didn't say the binding energy is gluons, but I suppose it's more accurate to say that the binding energy of the strong nuclear force is mediated by gluons.
No such thing as ‘just energy’, every force needs a force carrier particle and gluons are that for the strong force. Photons are massless, too.
Saying it's made of gluons is exactly the same as saying that a charged object in electric field has it's potential energy made of photons.
It's not exactly informative nor true. Yes you can describe the electric field as sum of virtual photons but that's different to a normal photon. And even then the electric field is not the same as the potential energy. Sure it defines it but it's not the same as the potential energy of the charged object.
In case of protons it's the same. It's better to think of it as a field, which it is. Gluon in itself is "just" an excitation of that field. Just like photon is an excitation of the electric field. And the binding energy of the proton comes from the quarks interacting with the gluon field.
The reason I'm talking so much against the virtual particle viewpoint because then people will start thinking of some things whizzing about. That's not what happens. It's a field.
It's actually better to think of even the normal fermions with mass with fields, because that's what they are. It's no longer surprising that how does electron go through both slits at the same time or how all electrons are identical. Of course they are identical as there is just one electron field that has a very specific kind of excitation that propagates.
This is not some random "Look at my weird theory". It's what Quantum Field Theories are. I mostly blame bad science journalism looking at Feynman diagrams (a great mathematical tool, don't get me wrong) that has people thinking too much about virtual particles.