Comment by EA-3167
3 hours ago
It’s pretty intuitive in the context of confinement theory. Intuitively we imagine something like a rubber band, as you add energy in the form of tension the material passes a threshold and as you say snaps. For confinement however as you add energy to the system it doesn’t snap, you simply reach the moment when you’ve added enough energy to the system to create a new particle pair that are also confined.
This is the explanation for why when we collide beams of protons at near c they don’t produce a new higher energy particle, but a massive shower of secondary and tertiary particles like pions and kaons as a result of the decay chain from initial pair production.
Forgive me for being a layman, but where do these new gluons "go"? It seems to me that pretty much all the energy in the bond between to particles is between those two particles.
But then when the energy becomes great enough and it snaps into a new pair of gluons, do those new gluons go anywhere or do they stay in between the original pair of particles. Do the original particles shoot off into the distance because the force holding them together got converted into some new particles?
Is there a link where I could read more? At these super small scales all my intuitions break down so I'd like something more mathematical to get a grasp on things :)
Gluons are just the manifestation of the curvature of the color field.
Just like photons arise from the curvature of the electric charge field.
This is extremely complicated, it's called gauge theory.
> Is there a link where I could read more?
Ask your favourite LLM, it will explain much better.
Or 5 hour video on the subject, but with all the math:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfeeIwmb_hw
That's a great question getting to the heart of the physics at play, so please don't apologize. A good model for quark-quark interaction is to imagine them in the context of their color charge, which acts like a complex form of the more familiar concept of EM charge. Since they carry this charge they're coupled to the strong force in a manner analogous to the more familiar EM flux tubes. When you add energy to the qq system you're adding energy this flux tube and making the whole system "hotter". Eventually instead of one flux tube defining one qq interaction you get the "snap" and end up with 2 flux tubes and two qq pairs. Assuming that you aren't still dumping energy into the system with some way to confine it, everything is going to fly apart and rapidly cool down. This leads to the really neat part, the reason we see particle showers at colliders and elsewhere: Hadronization. You can think of this as the condensation of Hadrons from the high energy quark-gluon plasma you find in conditions like a particle accelerator of sufficient capability, or the very early universe.
So in the model of two proton beams near c intersecting you essentially have the protons go through a phase change- they almost melt into a quark-gluon plasma that's stupendously hot- followed by a rapid condensation into a showers of kaons, pions, new protons... all of it adds up to the original mass of the protons in the collision. If you surround the area of that collision with EXTREMELY sensitive calorimeters and devices designed to monitor this process you can do some incredible accounting to find out what if anything is missing. That missing bit would be a possible new particle, some new physics, or as is often the case a chance to learn more about possible errors in measurement.
https://modern-physics.org/hadronization/
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...
https://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C990809/docs/webber.pdf