I’ve seen a documentary about neutron stars, saying they have an electroweak core “where quarks burn”. It’s also to my understanding that these forces were merged in the instants after the Big Bang. So assuming pockets of electroweak exist, how do they work?
In: Physics
Neutron stars don’t have electroweak cores. Electroweak stars are a theoretical type of star even denser than a quark star (which itself is a theoretical type of star denser than a neutron star). In electroweak stars quarks would be converted into anti-leptons, which is only possible through the electroweak force. This acts less like a force in a classical sense and more as an interaction, normally the number of leptons is a conserved quantity, it can’t be changed. But in electroweak interactions you can change both baryon and lepton number as long as you keep the difference between them the same.
Electroweak force exists everywhere. It only matters in certain nuclear reactions though, where it can transform protons to neutron or vice versa (by converting quark types).
The most common occurence on earth are Beta-decaying radioactive materials.
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