Thursday, 26 May 2016

electromagnetic radiation - Are there weak force waves?


In the same way as there are electromagnetic and gravitational waves that update the information on their respective field, is there an analogue for the weak and strong forces?



Answer



No, there are no weak or strong waves in the sense as there are for electromagnetic or gravitational waves.


The electromagnetic and gravitational waves are classical objects, they are possible vacuum solutions to the classical equation of motion for the field strength of the respective force, and can be radiated by objects charged under the respective force. But the weak and the strong force have no analogous classical limits - the weak force is suppressed by a factor $\mathrm{e}^{-\mu r}$ due to the mass of the W- and Z-bosons and thus very different from the EM or gravitational force, and it doesn't make sense to speak of a classical limit of the strong force because gluons and quarks are confined - there are no net charges under the strong force on a classical level, hence the strong force just vanished from our description.


In other words, the weak and the strong force are, in some sense, "fully quantum" in that their importance to our world comes completely from their quantized description, and a classical description does not make sense for them, thus we cannot speak of a classical concept such as a wave for the weak and strong forces.


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