And they casually mention in it that the force that binds quarks together becomes stronger with distance. I carried on reading, then suddenly thought WTF?! I assumed all forces declined with distance? I’ve never heard of anything like that! Hows does that work? What is this force called? Anyone know?
The Strong Nuclear Force does indeed increase in strength the farther two particles are pulled away from each other…this is why we can never see a lone quark all by itself.
You certainly have heard of and experienced forces like that. Take a spring and stretch it. Does the force between the ends of the spring increase or decrease as you stretch it?
Hmm but does it change with an increase of distance? Does the heart grow even fonder if the hearts move to say Asia as compared to just a few thousand miles?
I don’t know this stuff off the top of my head, but I can give you a few clues on the strong force from Leon Lederman’s book The God Particle. It might help you Google for more details.
[Leon]
[Discussing experimental results] “Whatever the force was, the electron scatttering indicated that it was surprising weak when the quarks were close together.”
“Gauge theories could predict the counterintuitive idea that the strong force gets very weak at close approach and stronger as the quarks move apart. The process,… carried [the] name… asymptotic freedom. Asymptotic roughly means “getting closer and closer, without ever touching.” Quarks have asymptotic freedom. …What this means, paradoxically, is that when quarks are close together they behave almost as if they are free. …Short distances imply high energy, so the strong force gets weaker at high energies.”
[/Leon]
Also, the messenger particle for the strong force is called a gluon. Get it? The gluon is the “glue” that holds quarks together.
One thing to remember about the nuclear strong force, is that although it may seem to increase with increasing distance, it’s effect is over a limited distance which is roughly in the neighborhood of the atomic radius. If quarks can be pulled apart farther than that, they’ll break free
Let me correct and expand a little. I should have said a quark antiquark pair is created. Second, the top quark has been observed and to some extent it’s free, it decays so quickly that it doesn’t have time to pair up with another quark.
However, no assembly of bound quarks can be severed to create a free quark.
Not quite. If there’s not another quark (strictly speaking, an antiquark or two other quarks) there to pair up with, then you can’t form the t to begin with. Most likely, you’ll form some sort of antiquark at the same time as the t quark, so what you’re actually observing is a meson which contains a t quark, not the quark itself.
As a nitpick, by the way, it’s not the strong nuclear force we’re talking about here, it’s the color force. Even though the strong force is orders of magnitude stronger than the electromagnetic force, the strong force itself is just a sort of leftover residue of the stronger yet color force.
And as an aside, I know that the terms are a bit outdated, but I personally prefer the names “Truth” and “Beauty” for the t and b quarks, rather than “Top” and “Bottom”.
In my experience, yes. You really feel the increased distance thanks to the increased cost of phone calls and travels, time zone differences, phone time lag, different TV and movies playing, etc.