Question is as clear as stated in title.
What is the maximum energy that can be stored in a gluon field flux tube without production of an quark anti-quark pair?
And how much it usually store in a meson?
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1 Answer
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A string with heavy $Q$ quarks at the endpoints breaks by forming $Q\bar{q}$ mesons. Taking $c$ quarks for illustration we have $\bar{Q}Q\to \bar{Q}q+\bar{q}Q\to D+\bar{D}$, where $D$ is a D-meson. Using $m_D=1.85$ GeV, and $m_c=1.29$ GeV, I can store $2(m_D-m_c)=1.1$ GeV in the string. With a string tension of 1 GeV/fm, this corresponds to a length of about 1fm.
For detailed studies, see here http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-lat/0505012.
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$\begingroup$ And how much it usually stores in a meson? $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 18, 2016 at 18:39
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$\begingroup$ In a heavy quark meson, this is a well defined question. The string stores (string tension)x(mean $\bar{Q}Q$ separation). This is something like 200 MeV in a J/psi. In light mesons, the question does not make sense, because light quark strings break very easily. $\endgroup$– ThomasCommented Feb 18, 2016 at 19:07