Timeline for Why don't green and anti-green gluons immediately annihilate each other?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 4, 2021 at 10:28 | vote | accept | Kurt Hikes | ||
| Jul 13, 2020 at 23:16 | history | edited | Kurt Hikes | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Clarifying
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| Jun 17, 2019 at 22:53 | comment | added | user178876 | There are no anti-gluons for the same reason that there are no anti-photons. Gluons are in the adjoint representation of SU(3), which is real, as @CosmasZachos. One way to get (a feeling for the) color content of gluons is to look at $(\bar r,\bar g,\bar b)^T\lambda_a (r,g,b)$ with $\lambda_a$ denoting the Gell-Mann matrices. | |
| Jun 17, 2019 at 21:49 | comment | added | TEH | Yeah I did not read the question carefully enough. I thought he was asking about quark anti-quark annihilation as opposed to gluons. This makes my answer barely relevant at all (and multiple things I said incorrect). So I will just delete it. | |
| Jun 17, 2019 at 21:35 | comment | added | Cosmas Zachos | A single gluon has a color and an anticolor label. A green-antigreen gluon is the gauge QFT excitation coupling to a green quark and an antigen antiquark. As @marmot says, you cannot talk about three $\bar{G}G, ~ \bar{R} R, ~ \bar{B} B$ gluons, since they'd sum up to a color singlet, so no gluons. You must always be mindful that these are overstretched metaphors to summarize the math in codespeak, and hardly anything else. Taking these cartoons too seriously ignoring the math always leads to grief! | |
| Jun 17, 2019 at 20:02 | comment | added | PM 2Ring | Kurt, we don't have a set of gluons and a separate set of antigluons. Very roughly, a green quark can turn into a red quark by emitting a green-antired gluon, and if a red quark absorbs that gluon it will turn green. But that's just a rough "cartoon" of the actual QCD model. You need matrices & group theory to describe it properly. | |
| Jun 17, 2019 at 19:46 | history | edited | Qmechanic♦ |
edited tags
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| Jun 17, 2019 at 19:22 | answer | added | user178876 | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jun 17, 2019 at 19:11 | comment | added | Kurt Hikes | So, Marmot, a SINGLE gluon is 'green/anti-green'? It's not as if two different gluons, one 'normal' and one 'anti', are paired together? But the term 'anti' in a gluon context still refers to antimatter, right? So why can't gluons and antigluons destroy each other? TEH's answer below implies they can, just not always or right away necessarily..... | |
| Jun 17, 2019 at 18:53 | comment | added | Cosmas Zachos | @marmot This is as good as an answer, if you wrote up a few framing sentences around it. The OP might not understand these two labels for a single particle.... | |
| Jun 17, 2019 at 17:53 | comment | added | user178876 | There are no "green" gluons, nor "anti-green" ones. They transform in the adjoint. You may come up with charges of the type "green--anti-red" and so on. | |
| Jun 17, 2019 at 17:51 | comment | added | probably_someone | You could ask this question in a much simpler context - when a gamma ray produces an electron-positron pair, why don't they immediately annihilate? The answer will likely be similar. | |
| Jun 17, 2019 at 17:47 | history | asked | Kurt Hikes | CC BY-SA 4.0 |