It has been stated that fundamental particles cannot be split, due to the strong nuclear force but, despite how much stronger it is than gravity, despite how fast objects move at the subatomic scale, and despite how much energy is required to split them, it had me thinking. If we have the capability to create a Higgs Boson at Cern with two protons, couldn’t we destroy one? Google says that it takes 125,000,000,000 Volts to create a Higgs Boson, does that mean that in order to destroy a proton it takes maybe a few billion or trillion more Volts? What if we used enough heat (millions of degrees Celsius) to melt a proton, or used a laser that uses enough lasing crystals that go down to the nanoscopic level to focus a laser beam, and use so much energy for said laser that it splits the proton? Is there any way that a proton could be split? Maybe even a quark, using enough energy?
Fundamental particles can't be split, that is literally what the definition means. Protons aren't fundamental particles, they can be split. Gluons, as far as we know, are fundamental.
>>16566170go sniff glue yourself. Proton is a fundamentalist particle
If you try to pull quarks apart, instead of splitting the proton, the energy you apply would go into creating new quark-antiquark pairs (hence new particles)
>>16566178How can it be when it's formed of quarks and gluons?
>>16566184More in this: The strong force doesn’t weaken as quarks move apart; in fact, it becomes stronger with increasing distance, similar to a rubber band stretching. This makes pulling quarks apart extraordinarily difficult. At a certain point, the energy in the stretched force field becomes so great that it’s more "economical" for the system to create a new quark-antiquark pair than to continue stretching. This process converts the input energy into mass.
>>16566166muh particles are field excitations. “Destroying” a field is a meaningless term. Particles are created and annihilated all the time, but this is just the way fields interact between themselves. We call a particle “constituent” if the field theory that describes it is a so-called effective field theory, which doesn’t work past a certain energy. A more “fundamental” field theory describes particle behavior at these higher energies and the “less fundamental theory” is recovered by “integrating out” degrees of freedom not present at lower energies. All of this is just jargon and you need to understand the math before you make le philosophical longposts spewing nonsense.For example, protons and neutrons are constituent particles because the effective field theory describing their interactions via pions breaks down at about 200 MeV, the Hadgedorn temperature. As you approach this temperature, particle scattering looks more and more inconsistent with the effective field theory. Past this temperature, you need QCD. You can recover the EFT from QCD by integrating out quarks and leaving all trivial representations.
>>16566166Energy is not measured in volts.
>>16566166>What if we used enough heat (millions of degrees Celsius) to melt a protonThis has been done. They smash heavy nuclei together at the LHC and they get something called the quark gluon plasma. The temperature of the final state ends up being trillions of degrees Celsius.
>>16566166nobody destroy shit, only transform.
>>16566201ykno, that actually makes intuitive sense but that miight be cause im pretty high
