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Old April 17th 13, 04:06 AM posted to sci.physics,sci.astro,sci.physics.relativity
Tom Roberts
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Posts: 344
Default Residual Strong Nuclear Force vs. Dark Forces?

On 4/16/13 4/16/13 5:48 PM, Yousuf Khan wrote:
[...] it must also be possible that the gluons
can completely escape the nucleus altogether, [...]


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....

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.


[... rest omitted as it depends on that basic error]



Tom Roberts