You meant to say yes. Within the Standard Model, as you say, the photon and electron fields have different properties, therefore have to be treated as separate.
In this case, just don't forget to draw the arrows! However, this seems to me like a careless introduction of Feynman diagrams within a pedagogical text.
The diagram you show may be useful (but maybe even more so misleading) for a heuristic approach to the scattering problem. Apart from the remark that you would have to include arrows on the lines, one has to notice two important facts:
1.) In quantum field theory, scattering amplitudes are...
Yes, it is. It allows one to calculate meson, baryon and glueball spectra, form factors, and even incorporates chiral symmetry restoration at high temperature. If you're interested, take a look at some of those papers:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0412141
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507073...
The axial anomaly of nonabelian gauge theories actually comes from a broken U(1) symmetry.
In QCD, you have U(N_f)_L\times U(N_f)_R chiral symmetry, with both a conserved left-handed current L^\mu and a right-handed one, R^\mu. It is now possible to make a linear combination of those two...
There is a very nice website http://physics-animations.com/Physics/English/phon_txt.htm explaining your example generally (it has different masses instead of different force constants, but you can just rename the constant in the first equation on the webpage).
The animation in the bottom...
The only reason I can think of is: By defining S=k_b \log \Omega, it just works out; for an ideal gas as well as for other systems (that I can't come up with right now).
\frac{dS}{dE}=\frac {1}{T(E,...)}\, states that temperature is a measure of the increase in entropy when some energy is...
In it's strict mathematical formulation, it is restricted to string theory.
I'm not sure about Susskind and t'Hooft, but Maldacena is the one who conjectured it.
The black hole entropy was derived without explicit use of string theory, and as such it can be seen as a manifestation of the...
The holographic principle manifests itself in string theory in the form of the so-called "AdS/CFT-Correspondence". It was formulated in the late 90's by Juan Maldacena (hence it is also often called "Maldacena Conjecture") and it states a duality between a type IIB string theory on an...
"Energy is borrowed from the vacuum"/Virtual Particles
I know that there are countless threads on virtual particles (some of which I have participated in), but I don't think that this issue has been adressed yet.
One common handwaving argument for the existence of virtual particles is the...
Do you refer to the holographic principle in the form of the AdS/CFT correspondence? If yes, then you should be more careful. It is a conjectured mathematical equivalence that allows one to map thermal states of quantum fields in a lower dimensional space to thermal black holes in a lower...
Am I missing something important, or isn't the only difference between the addition of your field a(x) and a simple gauge transformation that you call it a "background field" instead of a "gauge transformation"?
Wrong. Energy is an attribute, they carry a certain amount of it, but you can't say that they are energy.
Electrons carry charge and are therefore sources of an electromagnetic field. An electromagnetic wave on the other hand can be thought of as a propagating change of such an...
What you say may be true to some extent, but there are certainly many people (including me) who enjoy the music just for what it is: music. I don't care about the culture attached to it, I just enjoy it on a musical level. You make it sound as if people only listen(ed) to it because it is/was...
Hi,
I use ParallelMap with Mathematica on Linux to solve 100 eigenvalue problems on 4 kernels. This operation ist repeated very often, and over the course of time the performance drops significantly. Using top, you can see that the CPU used by the master kernel increases, and the CPU used by...
I'll try with a simple explanation: in flat space (far away from the black hole) we have light cones with an angle of 45° from the horizontal space axis. Now as you get closer and closer to the black hole, the curvature of spacetime makes the light cones bend inwards, which basically means that...
First of all, the physicist's name was Heisenberg, not Heisenburg.
Now I see where your confusion comes from: It's semantics. "Complementary parameters" is just a wrong wording: they are actually hermitian operators that obey the uncertainty principle for certain reasons. If you don't know...
Ah, I see. If it is a decent course, they should teach you more about spin eventually!
Sorry, it was definitely not meant that way! I just wondered what kind of education you had, because it would've been odd if you were for example a physics major who never heard about the mathematical...
It is called spin because the generators of the group of spin transformations obey the same algebra as those for angular momentum (SU(2)). So, the analogy to something spinning around is purely mathematical.
Why does the term on the right hand side survive the r->infinity limit? Sure, it goes to zero slower than the others, but if we assume the ideal point r=infinity, it is also zero. You can basically think about it like this: Schwarzschild geometry is asymptotically flat (i.e. minkowski at...
I think I got you wrong, do you mean the quantization of the vector potential A_{\mu}? Anyways.
What you describe here is one distinct Feynman diagram. It is no picture of physical reality...
By stating this, you are stating that QED is "wrong".
You keep claiming this, but you have nowhere shown something to back you up. What you say is simply not true.
I agree. When you break down something complex so that the general public can understand it, there is always the danger of losing or mixing up important information, so that the outcome is something completely different than what you originally wanted to convey. One has to be careful!
Well, this basically goes down to the question whether something like an absolute reality exists, or not. All we can rely on is experimental data, and theories can only be judged by whether they fit the data or not. "Shut up and calculate" might seem like a narrow-minded approach, but it makes...
I understand that point, but I also think that people should be more understanding when people who have actually studied QFT and know details about the story tell them that they a wrong in certain aspects. It's like people are stuck with a false concept despite all the evidence against it. I...
I never said that they did. My point is that a physical theory can only answer "why"-questions to a certain degree. At some point, you have to assume fundamental entities within such a theory. In our case the fundamental aspect would be the influence of fields on charges. One could always ask...
Sorry, maybe I was misinterpreting you! I thought that you interpreted the text in such a way that virtual particles actually were physical objects, sorry!
Then why are so many people here claiming that virtual particles are the answer?