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When an electron exchanges a virtual photon with another electron or proton, is the virtual photon a real particle or just a mathematical construct? In string theory, the force carrier particles of the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces are supposed to be open string bound to their d branes. But if virtual particles are just mathematical how can this be?

Qmechanic
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    Possible duplicate of http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/147096/. – HDE 226868 Sep 13 '15 at 22:37
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    Required reading: http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/virtual-particles-what-are-they/ – Alfred Centauri Sep 13 '15 at 23:07
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    possible duplicate of Virtual photons, what makes them virtual? – Kyle Kanos Sep 13 '15 at 23:34
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    The question implies that electrons are "real" particles. They aren't real, either. There are, indeed, no particles, at all. There are, however, changes in field configurations. The ones that last are those that we call "real particles". The ones that don't last are virtual. Whether they are purely mathematical artifacts of the description or not is, to my best knowledge, not a testable hypothesis. – CuriousOne Sep 14 '15 at 00:07
  • More related stuff at http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/162845/what-physical-evidence-is-there-that-subatomic-particles-pop-in-and-out-of-exist, there are reactions in which "virtual" particles are made "real" in the usual meanings, which is to say the short-lived configurations changes can be selected and amplified into long-lived changes in @CuriousOne's language. Or you can just understand that these words "virtual", "real", "particle" all stand in for a fairly sophisticated understanding and use them because they are convenient. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Sep 14 '15 at 01:16
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    @CuriousOne, to be sure, your crusade for "no particles at all" is not to say that there aren't, e.g. electrons, correct? That is, an electron is what it is and not what it isn't. If we choose to call an electron a fundamental particle, the electron still is what it is. To say that "there are no particles" is, I think, too strong. – Alfred Centauri Sep 14 '15 at 01:28
  • @AlfredCentauri: I am merely trying to undo a century of poor physics teaching. Particle physics is something that is being taught by mediocre K-12 teachers. Competent K-12 teachers teach center of mass physics. From there you can boostrap yourself all the way to string theory and loop quantum gravity without using that religious belief in particles even once. Is an electron "real", of course, in the sense that it's the result of a bunch of conservation laws which allow quantum fields only to change in certain ways and not others. Does that make it a particle? Of course not. – CuriousOne Sep 14 '15 at 02:34
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    @CuriousOne, "trying to undo a century of poor physics teaching." - oh good grief... never mind. – Alfred Centauri Sep 15 '15 at 01:55
  • @AlfredCentauri: Don't worry, there was a lot of first class physics teaching during the same century. :-) – CuriousOne Sep 15 '15 at 01:59

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This started as a comment in reply to CuriousOne's comments but is getting too long, so I will answer the question if it does not become duplicate.

Observations are the basic definition of "real" in physics, as with life in general.

Observations start from classical particles, and in the last centuries a consistent mathematical model of mechanics, electrodynamics etc has been built up. These mathematical models are called theories and in addition to mathematical axioms have specific laws which connect the observations to the mathematics. Nobody is asking if the arrow that killed the bird is real, though its trajectory is accurately predicted given the initial conditions by classical mechanics. The mathematics involved, a parabola in this case is virtual in the sense that it can only be fitted/seen if all the points in space where the arrow passed are measured.

As one goes to the microcosm particles are being observed and studied classically, except that when reaching dimensions commensurate to h_bar these observed particles transmute in behavior, i.e. do not always follow classical physics trajectories and interactions.

The electron was discovered by its behavior as a particle and its trajectory seen in a cloud chamber in the beginning of the 20th century. Here is the track of an electron:

electronenter image description here

The red track can be fitted using classical mechanics and classical electrodynamics with energy loss in a medium.

As observations accumulated it became evident that these very small mass particles were a different beast and a different mathematical model was needed to cover their behavior. This was quantum mechanics which allowed the calculation of energy levels in atoms and developed into a program for calculating interactions between, crosssections and lifetimes etc. The wavefunctions, the solutions of the quantum mechanical equations, gave a probability density distributions when squared and explained the wave behavior of cumulative interference patterns for electrons .

The calculations were cumbersome until Feynman introduced the iconal representation of the mathematical perturbative expansions with the Feynman diagrams. These have a one-to-one correspondence with mathematical functions entering the integrals necessary for calculating crossections etc.

This diagram shows electron-positron annihilation.

e+e-

All items in the icon have a mathematical expression which leads to writing an integral that can be calculated to give the probability of this annihilation happening, the crosssection to first order ( there are higher orders in the perturbative expansion for the calculation). The exchanged electron is called virtual, because it cannot be measured, in the mathematics it is a propagator function which has as a variable the momenta and energies that would define its mass, so its mass is not the electron mass as it should be. It has all the quantum numbers of the electron to ensure the correct conservation laws but not its mass. Particles off mass shell in the middle of Feynman diagrams are called virtual and are unmeasurable. Particles entering and leaving the diagrams are measurable and are what the experiment can record and are called real.

So virtual are a useful mathematical representation that can never be real because it cannot be measured at an instant of (x,y,z,t).

Then comes second quantization as discussed in the comments, which is a further level of unreality as far as the way it is being presented often in answers here. The whole space, (x,y,z) is covered by a field of operators, called creation and annihilation operators. These operate on the wavefunctions defined by quantum mechanical equations and are useful as a model in writing the Feynman diagrams . Their connection to real measurements comes through the Feynman diagrams. In this sense, the level of virtuality is one step higher . It is obviously mathematically satisfying to be thinking of fields and creation and annihilation operators, but it still is mathematics. The physics lies in the measurements and the accuracy with which the measurements fit existing data and predict new ones.

A statement "there are no particles just creation and annihilation operators" is a statement of belief, in a mathematical model, not a physics stament. Of course, the mathematical functions and operators exist, the way the parabola describes the track of an arrow. The parabola is not the arrow.

As for the string theory part of your question, it is just another level of virtuality, i.e. mathematical modeling, between numbers in measurements and mathematical modeling, as far as exchanges go. Whether real particles can be represented by vibrational levels of strings at the moment is at the level of hypothesis. It is still a mathematical model. If experiments can be designed that will measure the effects of the one-dimensional nature of the observed particles instead of the zero-dimensional as the standard model entries posit, is a matter for the future experimentalists.

Kasiéobì ùdumágà
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anna v
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  • You just wrote a tome on the big fallacy of particle tracks. Congrats, you managed to mystify a simple weak measurement phenomenon for another generation of kids by completely suppressing the fact that a droplet in a cloud chamber is not actually a position measurement. This was first analyzed correctly by Nevill F. Mott in "The wave mechanics of alpha-particle rays" in Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, A126, 79-84 (1929). The problem with particle tracks is that they are real but they are not actually showing QM objects because they result from a completely classical regime. – CuriousOne Sep 14 '15 at 05:32
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    @CuriousOne We completely disagree in this. You belong to the people who think that mathematics creates physics and not that mathematics is the tool to model observations. All tools are legitimate as long as they fit the data, imo, which is not yours. I am of the school :if it walks like aduck and it quacks like a duck it is a duck " until further data – anna v Sep 14 '15 at 07:07
  • Quite the contrary, Anna. I am the kind of people who know that measuring X does not mean that Object Y has an absolute property X. Moreover, I am the kind of experimentalist who pays attention to the details of what that measured X actually is. The coordinates of particle tracks in high energy physics are NOT measurements of position in the sense of quantum mechanics and you can easily test that by plugging the resolution of your detector into the uncertainty relation. The particle picture makes ZERO sense in QM and if you think otherwise then you are not paying close attention to nature. – CuriousOne Sep 14 '15 at 13:43
  • @CuriousOne The underlying framework of nature is quantum mechanical, but I, and you, live in dimensions where h_bar is practically zero. This allows the emergence of classical mechanics electrodynamics thermodynamics ... and these are valid in their framework. It makes no sense to insist that one should be counting the time in light years when one is living on earth, or keep the time of day from the revolutions of the moon just because there exists a mathematical formula that could do this.The coordinates are measurements of the path within the errors of the dimensions one is working in – anna v Sep 14 '15 at 14:15
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    All the LHC experiments measure tracks of particles within the errors, and they are particles in the classical sense, how they react to magnetic fields etc. We see the particle nature of the quantum mechanical entities. It is the accumulation of data that gives the probabilistic nature and the need for the quantum mechanical underlying framework. – anna v Sep 14 '15 at 14:21
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    The problem is not that there isn't a classical regime in the universe. Of course there is. The problem is that people are trying desperately to take (already poorly defined) properties from that classical regime down into the quantum regime. Particle properties are, for one, poorly defined even in the classical regime (talking about center of mass coordinates is NOT the same as talking about infinitesimally small particles), for another they simply don't work. Put an electron in a small enough de Broglie box. What do you get? Electrons, positrons, gammas etc.. Were those inside the electron? – CuriousOne Sep 14 '15 at 14:22
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    Of course they were NOT inside the electron. They were caused by an experiment that was, nonsensically, trying to nail the size of an electron down. And electron, when defined properly, does not have a size (unless it turns out to be a bound state, after all). It's a measurement that confirms charge, spin, fermion number etc. conservation of the quantum field. That is the correct way of characterizing an electron. The real object that we are measuring is the quantum field and it's simply not separable into particles. – CuriousOne Sep 14 '15 at 14:24
  • But of course the quantum mechanical entities have the complicated nature that necessitated the theory. That does not mean that one has to deny the aspect that follows the particle nature. It just means the these quantum mechanical entities are much more complicated than classical particles, even though they have an aspect, a projection, that is consistent with the classical – anna v Sep 14 '15 at 14:24
  • Well, lets stop this. For me fields are a convenient mathematical tool to work with Feynman diagrams and calculate the crossections for proton proton scattering. They are not a reality any more than the ellipse around the sun that the earth goes is a reality. – anna v Sep 14 '15 at 14:27
  • What is so complicated about NOT talking about a size for an electron? Nature doesn't give you a measurable size of an electron. It simply doesn't. Not for electrons and not for photons. It does for atoms, molecules and large solids. Size is a measurable quantity for compound objects that have a mesoscopic binding energy. It is not a measurable quantity for fundamental excitations, at least not on the sub-TeV range. God knows what we will find near the Planck scale or whatever there might be. But for now, just abstain from using a particle picture that doesn't work because there is no size. – CuriousOne Sep 14 '15 at 14:28
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    Here we agree. The field description works. So does the perturbation series approach, at least for many problems. There is nothing wrong with that as long as one keeps in mind that the diagrams describe mathematics and not actual physical objects bouncing around in space. Where it breaks down is when people start interpreting things in there that are either not testable scientific hypotheses or that are clearly false, like in case of the size of an electron. – CuriousOne Sep 14 '15 at 14:30