![]() In 2012, a particle matching the properties expected of the Standard Model Higgs boson was discovered at the LHC. Searching for the boson was the easiest way of confirming the Higgs field theory hence a search for the Higgs boson was a long-term ambition for particle physics. The Higgs boson ( H) is an excitation of the predicted Higgs field. Interactions with the Higgs field gives mass to all of the elementary particles in the Standard Model and, as such, is hugely important for the Standard Model to work. In the 1960s, Peter Higgs predicted a field permeating the universe to explain where the mass of Standard Model particles came from. At our universe's current low energy, they appear to be very different, but at a high enough energy (around 246 GeV) they merge to become the same interaction. Essentially, electromagnetism and the weak interaction are actually manifestations of the same interaction, the electroweak interaction. Within the Standard Model, the weak interaction has been successfully unified with the electromagnetic interaction. At the atomic scale, the strong interaction is the dominant interaction and hence it is responsible for binding together quarks into hadrons and holding the nucleus together. The characteristic time for strong interactions is less than 10 -20 seconds. This phenomenon prevents individual quarks from ever being observed.Įven though gluons are massless, the effect of colour confinement limits the range of the strong interaction to about 10 -15 metres, roughly the size of the nucleus within an atom. Eventually, it becomes a high enough energy that a quark-antiquark pair is created. When attempting to pull apart quarks, the increasing distance between them increases the energy of the colour field between them. This effect leads to the phenomena of colour confinement. The strong interaction is attractive, but it gets stronger with distance. A gluon carries both a colour and an anti-colour, this leads to there being eight different gluon types. Gluons are massless and they also carry colour charges, meaning gluons can strongly interact with each other, unlike photons. The force carrier for strong interactions is the gluon ( g). Baryons can also be colour neutral if each quark is a different colour (an RGB combination) this is a labelling concept that draws from white light being a sum of different coloured lights. Mesons can obviously meet this requirement e.g. This has nothing to do with the quark's visible colour, it is simply another quantum number. Antiquarks can carry anti-red, anti-blue or anti-green. ![]() All quarks carry a colour, which is either red, blue or green. Strong InteractionĪnalogous to how the electromagnetic interaction couples to electrical charge, the strong interaction couples to a different kind of charge, the colour charge. All everyday phenomena are either produced by electromagnetic or gravitational interactions. Examples of the electromagnetic interaction include atoms being held together, the force preventing stuff from falling through the floor, friction between objects and the interactions with electrons that form the basis of all electrical technology.
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