- #36
Vanadium 50
Staff Emeritus
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Well, you were wrong. The strength of the QCD flux tube is well known: 160,000 Newtons.
Bill_K said:That isn't what he does. He does not simply pull it apart. He cools it.
Bill_K said:He cools it in two widely separated places, and does nothing more. He let's the QGP decide for itself how to hadronize. Locally there appears to be no problem. But depending on exactly how it chooses to hadronize, color non-neutral parts may or may not have been produced, and without superluminal information transfer, the QGP will not know until much later whether or not color neutrality has been violated.
nikkkom said:What basis is under your claims about energies of three unpaired quarks? I though QCD methods aren't refined yet to make predictions in the limit of low energy?
Vanadium 50 said:Well, you were wrong. The strength of the QCD flux tube is well known: 160,000 Newtons.
The_Duck said:My argument is independent of how the QGP is separated into two chunks. It doesn't matter that this is accomplished by cooling rather than mechanical pulling, or whatever. If you have two separated color charges, there is necessarily a color field between them by Gauss's law. Gauss's law is satisfied at all times with no need for superluminal information transfer. This color field will have enough energy to pair-produce and neutralize both chunks once it stretches across about 1 fm.
mfb said:A toroid-shaped QGP would need nicely balanced color charges, otherwise it is not (or does not stay) empty "inside".
nikkkom said:What you somehow unwilling to grasp is that the "naked" color charges in these thought experiments are already separated by vastly more than 1 fm by the way experiment is set up.
nikkkom said:Pulling any number of quark-antiquark pairs out of the vacuum can't quickly neutralize anything in this setup, since these pairs are color-neutral.
The_Duck said:OK, let's consider the toroid thought experiment. Suppose the toroid gets split so that neither chunk of QGP is color-neutral.
What do you think the color field configuration looks like when each chunk has cooled enough that the separation between the two chunks of QGP has grown to, say, 1 meter?
I don't agree. Color-neutralization via pair-production works very quickly. For simplicity let me consider the quark-antiquark case rather than the three-quark case. Suppose we have a red quark (R) and an anti-red antiquark (r) separated by 2 fm or so. There is a flux tube of color field connecting them:
R===========r
(the === is the flux tube).
nikkkom said:before getting on your high QCD horse.