gluons emitting gluons

verdigris

Electromagnetic waves can be put in a box and quantized and the
result is photons, but gluons seem to be a case of a box within a box
- gluons can emit gluons.Is there any evidence that photons can emit
photons - shouldn't the force carrying particles have more in common -
shouldn't we be able to just look at a particle at random and say that
it has property x, property y and property z, therefore it is a force
carrier?

Igor

On Apr 6, 9:24 am, verdigris <verywells...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Electromagnetic waves can be put in a box and quantized and the
> result is photons, but gluons seem to be a case of a box within a box
> - gluons can emit gluons.Is there any evidence that photons can emit
> photons - shouldn't the force carrying particles have more in common -
> shouldn't we be able to just look at a particle at random and say that
> it has property x, property y and property z, therefore it is a force
> carrier?

Only particles with electrical charge can emit or absorb photons.
Since photons have no charge, they cannot emit or absorb other
photons. Gluons, on the other hand, carry both color and anti-color,
and so can emit and absorb other gluons.

Greg McLac

verdigris:

> Electromagnetic waves can be put in a box and quantized and the
> result is photons, but gluons seem to be a case of a box within a box
> - gluons can emit gluons.Is there any evidence that photons can emit
> photons -

They can't, since they have no electric charge.

> shouldn't the force carrying particles have more in common -
> shouldn't we be able to just look at a particle at random and say that
> it has property x, property y and property z, therefore it is a force
> carrier?

Yes, every force carrier is a boson, and every observed elementary boson is
a force carrier. A boson is a particle with integer spin, every observed
elementary boson has spin 1. The case of the gravitational force is
indefinite.

GML

Alex Knochel

verdigris wrote:
> Electromagnetic waves can be put in a box and quantized and the
> result is photons, but gluons seem to be a case of a box within a box
> - gluons can emit gluons.Is there any evidence that photons can emit
> photons - shouldn't the force carrying particles have more in common -
> shouldn't we be able to just look at a particle at random and say that
> it has property x, property y and property z, therefore it is a force
> carrier?

As said in other replies, photons are not charged electrically, so they
don't interact with each other directly. But what you CAN have is the
scattering of photons off each other by exchange of other particles,
for example electrons. This is also a means of looking for new light
particles, for example in the PVLAS experiment.

best, Alex