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nightvidcole
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- TL;DR Summary
- If a quark is knocked out of a hadron at ultrahigh energies, how does the glue field respond?
At low energies, color is confined because attempting to remove a quark from a hadron will cause a response in the glue field that is often described as "snapping", or more formally, quark-antiquark pair production. However, how does this work at ultrahigh energies, let's say around 10^21 or 10^22 eV - still well below GUT energies? If a 1-10 ZeV electroweak-interacting particle is incident on a hadron and knocks out a quark at high momentum transfer, relativity dictates that the glue field can only respond within a very small distance of the quark's trajectory, due strictly to causality and special relativity. Any response further away from the quark will never be able to "catch up" and pull energy away from the quark since that quark will have departed to a very large distance by the time a light-speed signal can reach it. Given that the QCD coupling constant is suppressed at short length scales, what allows color confinement to operate in this ultrahigh-energy regime? Has anyone run numerical simulations to see if you still get full hadronization even at these ultrahigh energy quark knockouts?