On 4/17/2013 12:43 AM, Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 16/04/2013 11:06 PM, Tom Roberts wrote:
Not really. It is energetically infeasible for them to do so. This is so
because gluons carry color charge, the force that holds the nucleons and
nucleus together. If a gluon managed to get even few fermis outside the
nucleus, it would be energetically favorable to create a
quark-anti-quark pair with the correct color charges to neutralize the
color force. Now you no longer have a gluon outside the nucleus, you
have a (color neutral) meson....

What sort of energy levels are required to create quark-antiquark
virtual particle?

no lower limit. literally. the minimum to create a meson depends on the
rest mass of the meson.

How much energy do these gluons have anyways?

depends on how hard they are hit.

These
quark/antiquark pairs would annihilate to form a gamma-ray photons
eventually anyways.

not if they don't have opposite colors, and of course since the gluon is
carrying color, this isn't the case.


I'm speaking VERY loosely here....

Experimentally, no isolated quark or gluon has ever been observed. The
above is a very loose description of the theoretical mechanism that
explains this.


Is it because they eventually turn to gamma rays?

Yousuf Khan