- Asymptotic freedom
In
physics , asymptotic freedom is the property of some gauge theories in which the interaction between the particles, such asquarks , becomes arbitrarily weak at ever shorter distances, i.e.length scale s that asymptotically converge to zero (or, equivalently,energy scale s that become arbitrarily large).Asymptotic freedom implies that in high-energy scattering the quarks move within nucleons, such as the neutron and proton, mostly as free non-interacting particles. It allows physicists to calculate the cross sections of various events in particle physics reliably using parton techniques.
Discovery
Asymptotic freedom is a feature of
quantum chromodynamics (QCD), thequantum field theory of the interactions of quarks andgluons which was discovered in 1973 byDavid Gross andFrank Wilczek , and byDavid Politzer . Although these authors were the first to understand the physical relevance to the strong interactions, in 1969Iosif Khriplovich discovered asymptotic freedom in the SU(2) gauge theory as a mathematical curiosity, andGerardus 't Hooft in 1972 also noted the effect but did not publish. For their discovery, Gross, Wilczek and Politzer were awarded theNobel Prize in Physics in 2004.The discovery was instrumental in rehabilitating quantum field theory. Prior to 1973, many theorists suspected that field theory was fundamentally inconsistent because the interactions become infinitely strong at short-distances. This phenomenon is usually called a
Landau pole , and it defines the smallest length scale that a theory can describe. This problem was discovered inquantum electrodynamics , it occurs in field theories of interacting scalars and spinors, and Lehman positivity led many to suspect that it is unavoidable. Asymptotically free theories become weak at short distances, there is no Landau pole, and these quantum field theories are believed to be completely consistent down to any length scale.While the
Standard Model is not entirely asymptotically free, in practice the Landau pole can only be a problem when thinking about the strong interactions. The other interactions are so weak that any inconsistency can only arise at distances shorter than thePlanck length , where a field theory description is inadequate anyway.Screening and antiscreening
The variation in a physical coupling constant under changes of scale can be understood qualitatively as coming from the action of the field on
virtual particle s carrying the relevant charge. The Landau pole behavior of QED is a consequence of "screening" by virtual charged particle-antiparticle pairs, such aselectron -positron pairs, in the vacuum. In the vicinity of a charge, the vacuum becomes "polarized": virtual particles of opposing charge are attracted to the charge, and virtual particles of like charge are repelled. The net effect is to partially cancel out the field at any finite distance. Getting closer and closer to the central charge, one sees less and less of the effect of the vacuum, and the effective charge increases.In QCD the same thing happens with virtual quark-antiquark pairs; they tend to screen the
color charge . However, QCD has an additional wrinkle: its force-carrying particles, the gluons, themselves carry color charge, and in a different manner. Each gluon carries both a color charge and an anti-color magnetic moment. The net effect of polarization of virtual gluons in the vacuum is not to screen the field, but to "augment" it and affect its color. This is sometimes called "antiscreening". Getting closer to a quark diminishes the antiscreening effect of the surrounding virtual gluons, so the contribution of this effect would be to weaken the effective charge with decreasing distance.Since the virtual quarks and the virtual gluons contribute opposite effects, which effect wins out depends on the number of different kinds, or flavors, of quark. For standard QCD with three colors, as long as there are no more than 16 flavors of quark (not counting the antiquarks separately), antiscreening prevails and the theory is asymptotically free. In fact, there are only 6 known quark flavors.
Calculating asymptotic freedom
Asymptotic freedom can be derived by calculating the
beta-function describing the variation of the theory'scoupling constant under therenormalization group . For sufficiently short distances or large exchanges ofmomentum (which probe short-distance behavior, roughly because of the inverse relation between a quantum's momentum andDe Broglie wavelength ), an asymptotically free theory is amenable to perturbation theory calculations usingFeynman diagram s. Such situations are therefore more theoretically tractable than the long-distance, strong-coupling behavior also often present in such theories, which is thought to produce confinement.Calculating the beta-function is a matter of evaluating Feynman diagrams contributing to the interaction of a quark emitting or absorbing a gluon. In
non-abelian gauge theories such as QCD, the existence of asymptotic freedom depends on thegauge group and number of flavors of interacting particles. To lowest nontrivial order, the beta-function in anSU(N) gauge theory with n_f kinds of quark-like particle is:eta_1(alpha) = { alpha^2 over pi} left( -{11N over 6} + {n_f over 3} ight)
where alpha is the theory's equivalent of the
fine-structure constant , g^2/(4 pi) in the units favored by particle physicists. If this function is negative, the theory is asymptotically free. For SU(3), thecolor charge gauge group of QCD, the theory is therefore asymptotically free if there are 16 or fewer flavors of quarks.Question: What is N?
"Answer": For SU(3) N = 3,and eta_1 < 0 gives n_f < {33 over 2}.
See also
*
asymptotic safety External links
* [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9809060 Twenty-five years of asymptotic freedom] (by David Gross) (Nobel Prize 2004 for this discovery)
References
*D. J. Gross, F. Wilczek, [http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v30/i26/p1343_1" Ultraviolet behavior of non-abeilan gauge theoreies"] , Phys. Rev. Letters 30 (1973) 1343-1346
*'t Hooft, unpublished talk at the Marseille conference on renormalization of Yang-Mills fields and applications to particle physics, June 1972.
* Pokorski, Stefan, "Gauge Field Theories", Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-521-36846-4
* H. D. Politzer, [http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v30/i26/p1346_1" Reliable perturbative results for strong interactions"] , Phys. Rev. Letters 30 (1973) 1346-1349
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