On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 8:47 AM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote:
Does anyone know why this interaction varies as the sixth power of > separation? Just to clarify -- the nuclear force is the one that drops off with the sixth power (per Robin). The speculative relationship between the "interaction half-life" and the separation distance is unknown, although it would be great to know what it is. (I was just providing an example of what it might be.) At the scale of nucleons the strong force, called the residual strong force, or nuclear force, in this context, is what is left over from the interaction of quarks and gluons within nucleons. The nuclear force is effective at 1 fm, and the nucleons are bound together within the nucleus through the exchange of mesons, which are quite massive. The more massive the force carrier, the shorter its range. In contrast to the residual strong force, the force carrier of the strong force is the gluon, which is massless and interacts with quarks. (Credit for this goes to Wikipedia.) (I wonder if this means the range of gluons is far, and if not, why not.) Eric
