Understanding Atomic Forces: The Role of Strong and Electromagnetic Interactions

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Dongmin
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This is my understanding of how an atom works. The Strong Interaction is responsible for the color force and the nuclear force. The color force is responsible for keeping quarks in hadrons, nuclear force is responsible for giving the nucleus its size and stability. And the electromagnetic force is responsible for keeping electrons in orbit?

Is this correct?
 
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Dongmin said:
The Strong Interaction is responsible for the color force and the nuclear force.
Strong interaction is the color force. The forces keeping the nucleus together is a residual force much like the van der Waals forces related to electromagnetism.
 
Although the force between nucleons eventually may be derivable from the color force between quarks, it is more easily understood as coming from meson exchange. It is not much like the Van Der Waals force, which would be related to polarization of the nucleons.
 
Meir Achuz said:
It is not much like the Van Der Waals force, which would be related to polarization of the nucleons.
It is very much like a London dispersion force, which is a type of van der Waals force. Of course, it is still describable by the exchange of mesons. Just like the London forces are a result of the influence of the photon fields of two atoms resulting in an attractive force, the residual nuclear force results from the corresponding effect for the pion fields.
 
Dongmin said:
nuclear force is responsible for giving the nucleus its size and stability.
The electromagnetic interaction is still relevant there. Nuclei would look significantly different without it.