Quark spatial change in nucleons & nuclear stability

[dkbenn]

I am curious to know if there have been any experiments to measure change in nuclear disintegration rates/ gamma emissions with change of distance between quarks in nucleons?

Thank you.

Douglas

 

[humanino]

Yes, it's called deeply virtual Compton scattering and gives access to general parton distributions. If you are interested I can provide references.

 

[dkbenn]

Yes I would be very interested in the references. Do the papers describe the mechanism of the Compton scattering and how it changes the position of the quarks within the nucleons? I am particularly interested in the distance changes between the quarks and the amount of change in the nuclide half life. Is this a quantum effect so that certain minimum distance changes have to occur before a nuclear rearrangement occurs? I am a non-mathematician (Professor of Radiology) so after reading the papers perhaps I could follow up with more questions.

Thank you.

 

[humanino]

It is a rather technical topic. For instance :
Leading twist nuclear shadowing, nuclear generalized parton distributions and nuclear DVCS at small x
So, this is exactly a description of gamma emission parameterized in terms of quark-quark correlations.

To my knowledge, the theory is not developed to the point where you are going to have an answer for half-lives however. In practice of course, we have no means to control the quarks positions so we could record changes in life-time. So at best, you would only have theoretical estimates.