Is Charge Conserved in Proton-Proton Collisions at LHC?

[LitleBang]

Is charge conserved in the remains of the collision?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Yes.

 

[LitleBang]

Can you clarify that just a little bit, like what permanently existing particles with charge remain after the destruction of the protons?

 

[kaksmet]

Can you clarify that just a little bit, like what permanently existing particles with charge remain after the destruction of the protons?

There will be electrons, muons, taus and their anti particles, and there will be mesons such as pions and baryons such as protons. Depending a bit on what you mean with parmanently existing particles.. say for example the positron would be permanent if it did not interact with anything else.. however it will so it is not permanent. Some of these particles decay on their own, but even the ones that doesn't will have their excistance threatened by the interaction with (for example) the detector.

I believe the charged particles that make it to the detector is almost exclusively electron, positron, muon, anti-muon and pions.

 

[blechman]

I believe the charged particles that make it to the detector is almost exclusively electron, positron, muon, anti-muon and pions.

LOTS of particles survive into the detector. Kaons and other mesons make it. So do protons, neutrons and other baryons that are created from various decays.

 

[LitleBang]

So we start with two +e's and this gets broken into partial charges that wind up after all is said and done with two +e's. Can you show exactly how this happens?

 

[blechman]

So we start with two +e's and this gets broken into partial charges that wind up after all is said and done with two +e's. Can you show exactly how this happens?

I am confused by your choice of the word, "show". Two charges come in, and a HUGE amount of stuff goes out. What actually comes out cannot be computed from first principles due to the fact that it involves the strong nuclear force. But whatever comes out, every step of the process conserves charge, and therefore there is no place for charge to not be conserved. Therefore at the end of the day, the total charge in is the same as the total charge out.

 

[LitleBang]

Please forgive me but it seems your sticking your head in the sand and hoping the problem will go away. One more question and I'll go away. What is the field of those two proton's made? They have this field that must interact with each other, doing work on other charged particles, and yet they never lose energy.

 

[Vanadium 50]

LitleBang, your first sentence is insulting. The second shows a profound misunderstanding of what a field is. The third is false.

I would suggest you work on the material in your second and third sentences before developing the attitude shown by your first.

 

[LitleBang]

Van you waltz into this post and claim that charge is conserved without any proof, but I should take your word for it because heaven forbid we have laws that say it is.

 

[minerva]

Van you waltz into this post and claim that charge is conserved without any proof, but I should take your word for it because heaven forbid we have laws that say it is.

What?

 

[humanino]

There is no evidence for a violation of charge conservation whatsoever. Of course it is difficult to provide with quantitative statements based on event-by-event detector reconstructions of heavy ion collisions. I am not an expert in those, but I know that charge conservation is crucial in their models.

At any rate, do you realize how catastrophic charge non-conservation would be for the big-bang model ? Tiny charge violation in the history of the Universe would lead to catastrophic long range forces. This is in fact the best place for you to look at your charge violation, you should obtain generic bounds much stronger that from accelerator experiments. So instead of complaining when someone points to your misconceptions, how about you provide us with a quantitative estimate from cosmology ?

 

[diggy]

Specific to the question, its not clear to me you could 100% test charge conservation in collider. You'd need full 4-pi coverage, and that can't happen if for no other reason you need the beam to come through.

Of course charge conservation may have been tested once or twice in the past in setups specifically designed to do such things... Possibly LHC's detectors were designed for other reasons...