Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: RadioAstronomer
You asked for a critique, so here goes:

Up, charm, and top use the gluon for their force carrier.
Down, strange, and bottom use the photon for their force carrier.

All six quarks are acted upon by gluons and photons. This is because all of them carry electromagnetic charge (u,c,t have a charge of +2/3 e, while d,s,b have a charge of -1/3 e), and all of them carry a color charge. There are three kinds of color charge, which are commonly written as red, green and blue. Every quark in the universe has one of these charges. Each flavor of quark can have any color charge.

(Geek alert: because there is one kind of EM charge, there is one photon, but since there are three kinds of color charge, there are eight gluons. Gluons themselves carry both a color charge and an anti-color charge, so you'd think that there would be nine gluons, but the combination red-antired + blue-antiblue + green-antigreen is colorless, so if you define a red-antired gluon and a blue-antiblue gluon, a green-antigreen gluon can be described as a superposition of the other two. Only eight gluons are needed to span the color space.)

E neutrino, u neutrino, and t neutrino use the W boson for their force carrier.
Electron, muon, and tau use the Z boson for their force carrier.

All quarks and leptons couple to both W and Z bosons. A W, for example, transforms an electron to an electron neutrino, or a t-quark to a b-quark.

Strong – The pion (and others)

Not wrong, exactly. The pion does mediate the inter-nucleon force. That force isn't fundamental, however. The fundamental force is the inter-quark force that binds the quarks into hadrons (such as protons, neutrons and pions), and that is what we usually mean by the strong force, nowadays. The force between hadrons is a residual color dipole interaction that is analogous to the Van der Waals force in electromagnetism.

The weak force is also necessary for the formation of the elements above iron. Due to the curve of binding energy (iron has the most tightly bound nucleus),

The curve of binding energy comes from the strong and electromagnetic forces. The role played by the weak interaction is to convert protons to neutrons and vice-versa, which is often required to make stable nuclei out of two lighter ones.

This particle has a zero rest mass, however, light has relativistic mass (since its traveling at the speed of light “C”) and can be acted on by gravity.

The relativistic mass of a photon is also zero. Gravity couples to energy density, which is typically dominated by mass. But even in Newtonian gravity, massless light particles will bend in a gravitational field (the trajectory of a test particle doesn't depend on mass).

47 posted on 03/12/2002 6:05:09 PM PST by Physicist
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 31 | View Replies ]


To: Physicist
Thanks. I certainly am not a particle physicist and I appreciate your time in correcting my post. :)
48 posted on 03/12/2002 6:21:26 PM PST by RadioAstronomer
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 47 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson