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Does a quanta of energy travelling very fast produce a quark / or quarks?
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Does a quanta of energy travelling very fast produce a quark / or quarks?
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ron123456
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Does a quanta of energy travelling very fast produce a quark / or quarks?
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09/04/2022 20:23:20 »
.....just learning.....thx
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Bored chemist
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Re: Does a quanta of energy travelling very fast produce a quark / or quarks?
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09/04/2022 20:49:36 »
What do you mean by "a quanta of energy"?
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Kryptid
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Re: Does a quanta of energy travelling very fast produce a quark / or quarks?
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09/04/2022 23:19:40 »
If you are talking about a photon, that will only happen if it interacts with something else. In some reference frames, the photon will not have enough energy to produce quarks, so the interaction is necessary because the needed energy will come from the relative motion of whatever the photon collided with.
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evan_au
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Re: Does a quanta of energy travelling very fast produce a quark / or quarks?
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10/04/2022 08:30:44 »
When high-energy photons (eg gamma rays) interact with a nucleus, they tend to produce a pair of much lower-energy particles, like an electron and positron. These fly off in opposite directions so momentum is conserved.
Quarks always hang around in groups (pairs, triplets, or sometimes larger groups). So you can't have two quarks heading off in opposite directions to conserve momentum - you need to produce at least 4 quarks combined as 2 mesons (ie much less likely than producing 2 particles like an electron+positron pair). These particles have much higher mass than an electron, which also makes their production much less likely.
A sufficiently energetic gamma ray would rapidly lose energy due to electron/positron production so that its energy would quickly drop below the minimum to produce a pair of mesons.
According to this diagram, if you collide an electron & positron, each with 40GeV, you can produce a quark/antiquark pair.
- This was the type of experiment done in LEP, the previous resident of the LHC tunnels.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Particle_creation.png
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