# Tag Info

1

Plasma is when the electrons are "freed" from their host atoms for a short time, due to high temperatures. Fire is plasma, it responds to electric fields. Lightning is also plasma. When a column of electrons flows from sky to ground, the air that it passes through lights up with energy. What we see as lightning is actually the air where the electrons are at, ...

7

This reaction is not possible, but for a nontrivial reason. As you note, the non-conservation of strangeness forces this to be a weak interaction, but there is nothing stopping baryons from partaking in weak interactions (as in e.g. this reaction). However, no charge is exchanged in the process, so it would be due to a weak neutral current, and these do ...

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I do not know if it is "plausible" (I do not think so), however a trivial model can be constructed for the one-dimensional case with continuous forces depending on velocities, for $c>0$ constant: $$F_{12}(v_1,v_2) = c\sqrt{|v_1-v_2|} \quad\mbox{and}\quad F_{21}(v_1,v_2) = -c\sqrt{|v_1-v_2|}$$ The system of these two particles does not admit a unique ...

1

The problem is that $N(x)/N$ is a probability density, not a probability. You can see that from the units: $N/\sigma$ has units "number per meter". You have to ask: How many balls will I find between $x_1$ and $x_2$? The expected number of balls is calculated from this density: $$\bar{N} \approx N(x) \Delta x$$ if $\Delta x = x_2-x_1$ is small ...

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While a single LHC particle wouldn't be doing much harm, being hit by the LHC beam would be certainly deadly and it would damage the machine badly. Any dense matter that comes into the LHC beam will instantly act as a beam dump. We have a very good idea about what happens in the LHC beam dump, see e.g. ...

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Nothing happens obviously, when one high energy particle penetrates flesh as cosmic rays continuously impinge on us and some have the energies of the LHC. The cosmic rays reaching us are mainly muons and the damage they do is with electromagnetic scatters/ionisations in their path. The mean energy of muons reaching sea level is about 4 GeV. Muons, being ...

47

Amazingly this actually happened to a Russian scientist called Anatoli Bugorski (WARNING: this is pretty gruesome). The beam basically just killed all the tissue it passed through. The symptoms were the relatively mundane ones expected from tissue death. The LHC has a much, much greater energy than the one that struck Bugorski, so it would cause a lot more ...

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A charged particle will create charge separation (ionization) along its path. This will cause harmful chemical reactions to occur in the body, including DNA damage. The effects of these chemical reactions depend on their amount. The body can heal from a low amount on its own, while a high amount will cause radiation sickness and probably death. This can be ...

1

From a decoherence point of view, fields are more fundamental as they give rise to particle-like behavior from the wave behavior if interactions with the environment are strong. In the end though, quantum mechanics only describes correlations between macroscopic changes in detectors (or other materials), so whatever kind of ontology you want to take in the ...

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Simply because it is usually taught from historical, heuristic and pragmatic point of view, rarely from axiomatic point of view (e.g. Wightman axioms, as mentioned in a comment by ACuriousMind). This is because it is taught to be useful, as most QFT calculations boil down to scattering and decay amplitudes, and as Sean Carroll said: Heuristic QFT, on ...

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An elementary particle is defined as an irreducible representation of the Poincar\'e group. These were classified by Wigner in 1939. This was done via the little group construction. The important representations are (metric signature $(-,+,+,+)$ $p^2 = 0$, $p^0 < 0$ - The little group is ISO(2). All finite dimensional representations of this group are ...

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Density is mass divided by volume. $$D=m/v$$ Most often in physics, we use the symbol Rho to represent density, so that $\rho=m/v$. With the density you mentioned of Uranium-238, the answer to your question is in isotopes. An isotope is when you have an atom of an element (meaning all your samples have the same number of protons. If you had a hydrogen ...

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