Pulling Apart Two Quarks

I heard that if you try to pull apart say two of the quarks that are inside of a proton, the farther you pull them the STRONGER the force gets between them to hold them together. A) Is this force the one they call the strong force or the weak force? I also realize that you can’t pull two quarks apart because it would take all the energy of the whole universe, somebody said. B) Is this true?
C) Also, are the two quarks that you are trying to force apart spinning around?
D) The proton is made up of two up quarks and one down quark I think and the neutron is two down and an up. But how does this add up to one positive charge for the former and no charge for the latter?
E) Does particle spin mean that when it bounces off another particle it deflects at an angle that can be accounted for if we sort of pretend it is spinning, but it reallyl isn"t?
F) Do particles all spin in the same plane or at any which way like stars?

There’s an easy way to pull two quarks apart…

Tell my three kids that there are two quarks in the other room. The first ones there get them… :slight_smile:

Zev Steinhardt

Turn the hose on them. Especially of they’re doing it in the front yard.

A) Strong force
B) No. The force between the quarks is constant, like a spring, and very large. What happens when you pull two quarks apart is you put so much energy into separating them that you have enough energy to create a quark-antiquark pair. And you do. In the spring analogy, the spring breaks before you get them macroscopically far apart. But that doesn’t mean the energy is infinite.
C) Well, they each have spin. I’m not going to try to explain spin.
D) Up quark charge = +2/3, Down quark charge = -1/3.
E), F) No.

[sub]IANAP (but I teach freshman college physics, for some reason)[/sub] :slight_smile:

The current model for the interactions between quarks is Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).

In this theory, the force between quarks is the so-called “color force.” Residual effects between quarks result in what we call the strong nuclear force between nucleons (protons and/or neutrons). The color force does not directly act between nucleons because they are color-neutral.

There is a chemistry analogy, in explaining the intermolecular forces that act between electrically neutral atoms or molecules. These intermolecular forces (called London forces) are a residual electric force resulting from a momentary imperfect cancellation among the attractions and repulsions of the charges within the two atoms or molecules.

Similarly, the strong nuclear force is a residual color force resulting from a momentary imperfect cancellation of the color “charges” acting within a nucleon.

The color force should actually be the first of the fundamental forces, replacing the strong nuclear force.

However, in fairness, I should point out that there appears to be some disagreement for what the “color force,” the “strong nuclear force,” and the “residual strong force” refer to. I am using the latter two terms to mean the same thing, the way I learned it. Some people seem to use the first two terms to mean the same thing, and thus refer to the strong force acting between quarks.

Here is a lay explanation that covers some of the questions in the OP:

http://webphysics.davidson.edu/mjb/qcd.html
http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure/index.html

As far as “spin” is concerned, I don’t believe we know exactly what spin is, other than it is almost certainly not what the name implies. In other words, nothing is spinning like planets on their axes.

I’d just add that one way to think of it is that the force lines between quarks are parallel. In other words, they don’t spread out through space like 1/r2 forces do. That means that the force between quarks does not depend on distance. As a practical matter, as ZenBeam points out, once you have separated two quarks by a certain distance, you have pumped so much energy into the bond that a new quark pair is created. This means that not only is it impossible to “separate” quarks completely, but that you can’t ever pull them apart by more than a very short distance.

You need two pair of very small tweezers and a quark knife with a friend to help. You grab one quark with each tweezer and pull apart and then your friend cuts in between with the quark knife, making sure to sever the charmed gristle. Viola, quarks are apart.