Quarks to Infinity: How Many Quarks Before Space Shrinks?

[tionis]

If I toss a single, composite particle toward a gravitational singularity, would the quarks inside it be tidally rip apart from their confinement with enough energy to create another pair of quarks? And if so, how many times can that process happen before space gets small enough so that confinement is restored? In other words, how many quarks would be created from that single, original hadron before the space shrinks enough for the process to stop?

 

[Simon Bridge]

What we are looking at is the interaction between QM and GR ... which would strictly need a theory of quantum gravity.
So it's the kind of question researchers are interested in.

Which means we'll need some idea about your education level to know how to pitch any possible answers.

Meantime, some things to consider:
1. quarks are not well understood in terms of classical particles.
2. there are already lots of quarks in each hadron or meson ... we see the net effect as 2 or 3 quarks.
3. the "singularity" of a black hole is a quirk of the mathematics rather than a physical object - you are more interested in the region close to the event horizon, and you'd need a pretty small black hole to get the gradient to produce tides in the range of the strong nuclear force over the dimensions of a single particle.

It will help to narrow it down a bit ... let's pick the simplest composite: a meson ...
There are papers on this, i.e.
Zomorrodian M.E. et al. (2010) The stability of mesons near the event horizon of a black hole [IJPS Vol.5(7) pp1050-3 ]
... which may go some way to approaching your question.

 

[tionis]

Hmm.. It appears to be more complicated than I thought, and my knowledge of Physics is amateurish. But thanks anyways, Simon :)