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
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