- #1
jeebs
- 325
- 4
Hi,
I keep reading about particles being produced in certain interactions, but I'm not completely clear on what this means. The image I have in my head is this. Say two protons collide with each other and move off with less energy than they started with, and the energy deficit goes into creating a new particle. The protons would have been repelling from their electromagnetic interaction, but also attracting from the strong interaction if they were close enough.
How does this energy actually get transferred out of the protons and into this new particle, given that it doesn't exist prior to the collision? Is this mechanism even remotely known about?
Also, I keep coming across things like "such and such a particle was created via the strong interaction". In a collision such as my example, how would we know whether the new particle produced was as a result of the strong interaction or the EM one, seeing as both interactions are present?
One other thing I've been wondering about - it's said that no single quarks are ever observed because the energy required to pull them out of a particle is always enough to create a new particle, right?
In other words, work is being done against the attractive strong force to separate them, so their potential energy in each other's strong field is being increased, right?
Does that mean that mass is equivalent to potential energy (that it's not technically their kinetic energy that matters) - and if that's true, is the cause of larger particle production not actually the collision but what happens just after the collision, ie. the colliding (and attracting) particles move away from each other until their increase in potential energy exceeds the new particle's rest mass?
(Conversely, for two repelling particles that create a new one, the new particle arises from the increase in potential energy just before the collision?)
Sorry if these questions don't quite make sense to you, I'm not even sure they make sense to me...
I keep reading about particles being produced in certain interactions, but I'm not completely clear on what this means. The image I have in my head is this. Say two protons collide with each other and move off with less energy than they started with, and the energy deficit goes into creating a new particle. The protons would have been repelling from their electromagnetic interaction, but also attracting from the strong interaction if they were close enough.
How does this energy actually get transferred out of the protons and into this new particle, given that it doesn't exist prior to the collision? Is this mechanism even remotely known about?
Also, I keep coming across things like "such and such a particle was created via the strong interaction". In a collision such as my example, how would we know whether the new particle produced was as a result of the strong interaction or the EM one, seeing as both interactions are present?
One other thing I've been wondering about - it's said that no single quarks are ever observed because the energy required to pull them out of a particle is always enough to create a new particle, right?
In other words, work is being done against the attractive strong force to separate them, so their potential energy in each other's strong field is being increased, right?
Does that mean that mass is equivalent to potential energy (that it's not technically their kinetic energy that matters) - and if that's true, is the cause of larger particle production not actually the collision but what happens just after the collision, ie. the colliding (and attracting) particles move away from each other until their increase in potential energy exceeds the new particle's rest mass?
(Conversely, for two repelling particles that create a new one, the new particle arises from the increase in potential energy just before the collision?)
Sorry if these questions don't quite make sense to you, I'm not even sure they make sense to me...