Are all transfer in energy a result of Boson interactions?

[Skyler0114]

Sorry if I posted this in the wrong forum, to me it looks like this forum is for high energy, nuclear, OR particle physics.
I was wondering if anybody could help me with this.
I was trying to ask my teacher about the nature of energy transfer, and she said something that I really believe is wrong.
I asked if there were any conclusions we could make about the properties of photons being exchanged between particles in a propagating sound wave, and she said that sound and light were two different things, and that 'light' was not emitted when the particles were vibrating.
I really think she's wrong, because of the following rational:

In a sound wave the particles are
the atoms are 'bouncing' off of each due to electrostatic repulsion between their electron shells,this must mean that electromagnetic forces are involved. By taking the fact that all forces require a carrier and that the carrier of electromagnetism is the photon (or photon virtual particle), I reach the conclusion that:
photons are exchanged between atoms as energy propagates from the source of the sound and that as the energy is distributed then either the number of interactions a distance away from the source is less or the photons exchanged are less energetic (I would bet on the first one at being first order and the second being second order).
Is there something I am not considering that makes my assumption invalid, and if not all transfers of energy between the force carriers of particles, then what is the truth.

 

[erkokite]

Sound is an emergent phenomenon in condensed matter systems- it is not a fundamental phenomenon like electromagnetic radiation. Sound itself can be thought of particles representing the quanta of sound waves, which are scalar field quanta known as phonons.

The phonon field itself represents the displacements of atoms in the continuum limit- in this manner electromagnetic effects are considered a lower level effect and are not important in the macroscopic (i.e. phonon level) system.

Maybe in a technical sense you could state that because the interactions between atoms are electromagnetic that sound has an electromagnetic aspect to it, but this is usually not how sound is treated in physics AFAIK (with the exception of sonoluminescence and plasma physics perhaps).

But it is quite incorrect to state that photons themselves are the carrier of sound- phonons are the carrier of sound and sound is an emergent, condensed matter phenomenon as opposed to a fundamental force like the electromagnetic.

The condensed matter forum is a better place for this- you can get more info there.

 

[Skyler0114]

Sound is an emergent phenomenon in condensed matter systems- it is not a fundamental phenomenon like electromagnetic radiation. Sound itself can be thought of particles representing the quanta of sound waves, which are scalar field quanta known as phonons.

The phonon field itself represents the displacements of atoms in the continuum limit- in this manner electromagnetic effects are considered a lower level effect and are not important in the macroscopic (i.e. phonon level) system.

Maybe in a technical sense you could state that because the interactions between atoms are electromagnetic that sound has an electromagnetic aspect to it, but this is usually not how sound is treated in physics AFAIK (with the exception of sonoluminescence and plasma physics perhaps).

But it is quite incorrect to state that photons themselves are the carrier of sound- phonons are the carrier of sound and sound is an emergent, condensed matter phenomenon as opposed to a fundamental force like the electromagnetic.

The condensed matter forum is a better place for this- you can get more info there.

I think sonoluminescence was almost exactly what topic I was looking for. Thank you for the fast reply. I'm taking high school (honors) physics and the way everything has been presented there was such a disunion of all the topics we were taught.What I'm primarily interested in at the moment with the physics I was taught is the underlying relationships between everything they taught and using it as a stepping stone to learn more about topics they did not teach us (aka plasma physics(right on the dot with that one), semiconductors, relativity, etc)