In particle colliders more energy is required to generate smaller particles. It feels contradictory while thinking that smaller particles like quarks *make* bigger particles like protons. So protons should have more energy because it is the sum of multiple smaller particles. But it is exactly opposite and quarks actually contain more energy. Right? If yes, why? please enlighten me.
In: Physics
A proton contains more energy than individual(or paired) quarks due to binding energy. So you are incorrect on that front.
Also these particles don’t have a size, any notion of big or small is meaningless. They are literally point particles in the standard model.
Think about it more as the energy it takes to break things apart. Take a car. If it’s just sitting there and I toss a wrench at it, I might chip some paint or crack some glass depending on where I hit it. Not much energy involved in tossing a wrench compared to the energy holding the pieces of the car together, so there’s very little liberated from the car. Now bring the car to highway speed and smash it into a stone wall – larger bits of car and stone everywhere. The energy of the collision (at least some of it) liberated the parts from each other. Now bring it up to supersonic speed and smash it into the ground – the car will be in lots and lots of smaller and smaller pieces. At a certain point, you can add enough energy to break the car into individual atoms.
While not exact, this is analogous to “creating” particles in particle detectors when particle beams are smashed together (they’re really being “released” – in a sense – from the particles they are a part of, again in a sense). So if you want to force a proton out of an atom, you need to add enough energy to free the proton from the binding energy of the nuclear force. If you want to break a proton into its constituents, you need to add even more energy.
So our current understanding of reality is Quantum Field Theory, what physicists all regard as the single most successful theory ever devised by man.
The most fundamental component of reality is the field. It’s REALLY HARD to express in layman terms what a field is. The best description I have is that it is a form of stress that exists at all points in space. Mathematicians and physicists both do not attempt to visualize this concept – that’s literally how we came to the idea of the Ether, in the 19th century, which wasn’t fully dismissed until after Einstein! To them, it’s a fundamental concept with known properties, and that’s as far as we can go today.
So fields exist everywhere, they have known properties and quantities, and they can impart an effect on things that interact with it. This includes other, overlapping fields.
So what is matter? Matter comes out of fields. It’s the physical manifestation of a field, or even a number of overlapping fields. So if you concentrate enough quantity of a given number of fields (ie “energy”) in one place, ::pop:: you can get a particle to come from seemingly nothing.
Some of these concentrations are extremely stable, for example neutrons, which have a theoretical half-life something longer than the universe will exist before its own heat death. Some are not – the Higgs boson was so short lived we only know we created it because it collapsed and emitted other subatomic particles in the predicted pattern and trajectories.
So how did we create the Higgs in the first place? It’s a particle manifest from the Higgs field – and particles that interact with it have mass because of it. Light doesn’t interact with the Higgs field, so it doesn’t have mass.
Well, as I said, these fields can interact with each other. Dump enough energy into one field, and it will have some proportionate effect on an overlapping field it interacts with in the same place. Ok, so that means we need to concentrate a humongous amount of energy in one spot, using the fields we can interact with (the fields that make up matter), so that energy can spill over into further and further adjacent fields. If we can get enough energy into them, they may just pop a particle into existence! If these particles were stable, we’d be surrounded by them already, but they aren’t stable, and they exist for only a fraction of a second. We try to conceive of experiments that maybe these particles can interact with, so we can deduce as much about them as we possibly can, but for the most part we have to work backward from their decay products.
And particle accelerators are used to concentrate that energy. We can’t accelerate matter to the speed of light – in fact, there is definitely an upper limit to how fast things will move. Beyond that, all you can do is make them more massive. This is really just a byproduct – this is what it looks like when you concentrate energy into the fields that make up these particles. The whole act of colliding these particles is just a way of further concentrating the energy.
Scientists will pursue ever larger and more powerful particle accelerators. The next generation accelerators will use wake fields – the idea being you have a plasma, which plasma have electromagnetic properties, and you carve a path through it – effectively making a vacuum cavity in the plasma, a WAKE through the plasma, like a boat makes a wake through water. Your high energy particles will ride within this wake, unperturbed by the plasma (you don’t want your particle crashing into some plasma ion). Because the plasma has some electromagnetic properties, it can be used to energize the particle, accelerating it. Currently we use much larger RF resonant chambers to do this. So in a sense we’re miniaturizing that technology and really, REALLY cranking up the efficiency. The most powerful of these accelerators fit on a table and can outperform the LHC, the largest accelerator, experiment, and machine ever created by man. They may start by using this as a first stage before entering the LHC ring. You then collide your particles as you normally would.
And when we learn all we can from such a machine, we’ll build them bigger, and bigger, and eventually move these machines out into space. And when we hit the limit of what’s actually possible to build and power, we’ll have to think about new physics to delve deeper into understanding the foundations of reality. And as far as how frightening these energy levels get, the most powerful machines scientists dream about pale in comparison to cosmic particles that regularly bombard our atmosphere – from deep space and interstellar origins. Most of those particles, with mass – NOT LIGHT – pass right through our planet like we’re not even here.
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