I heard that if you try to pull a quark away from one it is associated with (such as one of the two up quarks away from the other up quark and a down quark in a proton), it would take more and more energy the farther away you pulled the quark. This is because of one of the forces that is stronger the farther away the particles are from each other. The question is, suppose the quark was moved ten feet from the others, how many watts of energy would this require? Because I understand energy only in terms of watts, like a 60 watt bulb’s worth doesn’t pull much juice, but 1500 for a home electric heater is a lot.
You cant measure it in watts, itd have to be in Joules.
To clarify NeoDeftones’s post- a Watt is a measure of power, not energy (power being the rate of flow of energy). Power x time = energy. A 60 Watt bulb consumes energy at a rate of 60 joules per second. A 60 Watt bulb left on for 1 second consumes 60 joules, as does a 30 Watt bulb switched on for 2 seconds.
I have no idea how much energy is required to separate quarks (Chronos??).
Arjuna34
You’re right that the greater the distance between the bound quarks, the greater the force between them. To separate the quarks, then, you would have to add a lot of energy. Eventually, you will have added enough energy to create spontaneously a quark-antiquark pair. Once that happens, the original quark-antiquark pair (the one you are separating) now gets paired up with the new ones, and you’re now pulling on some hadron. Example:
u = up quark
u* = anti-up quark
(u-u*) = the combined quarks = a meson (here a pi-0 particle)
<—pull— (u-u*) —pull—>
eventually:
<—pull— (u-d*) (d-u*) —pull—>
The energy added by pulling was eventually enough to create
a down-antidown quark pair, leaving you with a pi+ meson and a pi- meson. These mesons separate quire happily. (Also, the quark-antiquark pair produced didn’t have to be down-antidown. It could’ve been u-u*, or charm-anticharm, etc.) This effect is often referred to as quark confinement.
So separating two bound quarks some macroscopic distance is an unphysical proposition. If one were to extrapolate the force out to such distances, though, you would get one of those ridiculously huge numbers that have little meaning (like 10^1000).
More physically, one could ask how much energy is needed to take a pi-0 meson and make it do what is shown above. The quick answer is to assume the initial meson is at rest and the final mesons are at rest. Then E=mc^2 and conservation of energy tell us the answer. Initially there is 134 MeV of energy (due entirely to the pi-0’s mass). In the end, we have two massive particles giving a total energy of 280 MeV (due to their masses). Thus, we needed to have added 146 MeV = 610^-18 kilowatt-hours = 210^-11 J. So, you can’t add much per quark (in lightbulb terms) before confinement takes over.
To actual do something like this experimentally, you need a particle accelerator. The energies created when things smash into one another are, in many accelerators, enough to create a shower of thousands of new hadrons. (“Hadron” simply refers to anything made up of quarks.)
-P