0

When a Hadron and its antimatter equivalent annihilate, what happens to the QCD "soup" (for lack of an appropriate term) from each?

Eg, the valence quarks in a proton - antiproton event, to they pair off and annihilate "in the moment"? What about the quark soup at progressively higher energies? How do we account for this?

(for that matter, if it's relevant, why only two gamma rays, and not more?)

Xeren Narcy
  • 805
  • 1
    If you take for example a proton-antiproton annihilation, Anna posted a bubble chamber picture of the results in her answer to this question. It is a messy business and typically produces a shower of pions. – John Rennie May 26 '15 at 05:37
  • Ok, I think that does partly answer my question (hadron annihilation produces mesons among other things), all the more curious now about how the valence quarks specifically function in that event, or if it makes sense to ask. – Xeren Narcy May 26 '15 at 05:49
  • 1
    It doesn't really make sense to ask. The proton isn't three point like quarks buzzing around in a sea of virtual particles. The quarks are delocalised, and the virtual particles are just a device for representing the energy in the quantum field(s). – John Rennie May 26 '15 at 05:51
  • I see, so the situation is better described by interacting fields, particle analogies are next to useless for QCD... In saying that, will the products of hadron annihilation still be related to the source hadrons in some way? Could we tell apart (for instance) neutron-antineutron from proton-antiproton, or neutron-antiproton / proton-antineutron by their products? – Xeren Narcy May 26 '15 at 06:02

0 Answers0