OK Yes I love Hank Green, lets start with this song. Quarks. The song pretty much gives you everything you need to know about Quarks. . First....there are four fundamental forces of physics. Gravitation, Electromagnetism, Strong Force, and Weak Force. Ill make this a four part series. . Ill start with Strong Force. This is the most powerful of the four forces. Strong force is what holds your atoms together. It does this in a couple of ways. It holds the atoms nucleus together, and it also keeps the protons and the neutrons in the nucleus from flying apart. Focusing on just the second part there, it does this through something called Color Force. . Now Neutrons and protons are both types of hadrons, and as the song said, hadrons are made up of quarks! (Quarks being a fundamental constituent of matter) And by fundamental, in the physics world this means they cant be broken down into other particles. Quarks and leptons (which include electrons) are the most basic pieces of matter in the entire universe. Now quarks come in a variety of traits, one of these is color. Its not like the red or blue you see, but rather a description of their quantum state. One we call red, one we call blue, and the last one is green. Quarks are assigned these colors because all hadrons are required by nature to be, as we describe it, colorless, meaning that the color components of the quarks have to cancel each other out. OK, so protons and neutrons are each made up of three quarks, meaning that as a rule they can only contain one quark of each color at any given moment. Now lets make this really fun and interesting, and insanely annoying....Quarks are constantly changing color. And there is an entire process that allows them to do this, they exchange insanely powerful particles called gluons. . So each of the 4FF (4 Fundamental Forces) has its own force carrier that is exchanged between particles that are controlled by that force. The gluon is the force carrier for the strong force. it has no mass, no charge, BUT it DOES have....color. So anyways, as the gluons pass between quarks, they change the color of the quark that they leave, and the one they go into. And it all happens in such a way that....it cancels each other out, keeping the hadron color-neutral. . So why did I explain all that? and how does this bind the quarks to each other? Well, color force doesnt work like other forces like gravity, which is stronger near a massive object and weaker as you get further away. Instead, the color force acts on quarks as though the gluon exchange were forming rubber bands between them. Quarks can move around inside the hadron, but if they stray too far away, the color force becomes very strong and yanks them back with enormous force. This is why quarks are never observed floating around by themselves, and it helps explain why three-quark hadrons -- protons in particular -- are extraordinarily stable. Amazing, right? Well, Im not done, because in fact the strong force is so frickin strong that a residual effect of this is that its able to hold the whole nucleus together. Thats called the nuclear force. But well continue this lecture tomorrow. ~Winter
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 13:00:02 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015