Timeline for How do Gravitons work?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2, 2021 at 8:26 | vote | accept | CommunityBot | ||
| Aug 29, 2021 at 10:09 | comment | added | Jeanbaptiste Roux | @ArAj Yes, and when you try to quantize general relativity, you have Feynman diagrams involving elementary perturbations of the gravitational field that we call "gravitons". Real gravitons are the external lines, and virtual gravitons are the internal lines (propagators). | |
| Aug 29, 2021 at 9:54 | comment | added | user311753 | So, Earth and Sun are not exchanging gravitons but they curve Gravitational field and this creates gravity? | |
| Aug 28, 2021 at 18:08 | comment | added | Jeanbaptiste Roux | I mean that these virtual particles can be thanks to the uncertainty principle $\Delta E\Delta t \geq \frac{1}{2} \hbar$: you cannot say you are in presence of a perfect vacuum (in the sense of perfectly 0 energy, 0 particles) if you observe the system within a sufficiently small time frame. This is the usual explanation of virtual particles in the sense of something real but undetectable. You can interpret them as fluctuations of the quantum fields. | |
| Aug 28, 2021 at 16:49 | comment | added | Tachyon | "we say we can not detect them, is just a consequence of the uncertainty principle." - You mean that we CAN detect them but only their complementary properties such as position or momentum? That is the uncertainty principle, right? Then they would be detectable? However, I have heard that experimentalists cannot detect virtual particles. Then why would you say that it is a consequence of the uncertainty principle if they are undetectable? | |
| Aug 28, 2021 at 12:50 | comment | added | Jeanbaptiste Roux | @Tachyon This is an interesting point, you are right to ask this question! What we call "virtual particles" are the internal lines of Feynman diagrams, so these are really just mathematics because Feynman diagrams represent the amplitude matrix, which comes from the $S$ matrix. But what we call virtual particles when we say we can not detect them, is just a consequence of the uncertainty principle. The wikipedia entry is quite good at explaining this. "Virtual particles" is a loosely defined term and is in fact plural. | |
| Aug 28, 2021 at 11:28 | comment | added | Tachyon | So the basic particle interactions are nothing more than mathematical artifacts/models, and their physical interpretation is an exchange of virtual particles? Is this the reason why we cannot detect virtual particles directly in the first place? | |
| Aug 28, 2021 at 11:20 | history | answered | Jeanbaptiste Roux | CC BY-SA 4.0 |