First collisions at the LHC with unprecedented Energy! (Ask a particle physisicist)

[JuliaL]

Hey Julia,

It makes sense to address your second question first - you're absolutely right, we understand the basic laws of Quantum Chromodynamics governing quarks at these energy scales very well. BUT: the QCD interaction between the gluon and quark fields unfortunately becomes so strong at these low energies that talking about individual gluons doing this or that makes no sense any more. One has a so called strongly interacting system which is super difficult to solve. We know the equations, but solving them to find what they can yield is an art form because of the strength of the interaction.

People try to tackle this by running a statistical simulation of many spacetime points based on the QCD equations (a technique called lattice QCD ), but this already requires massive supercomputing powers for much simpler systems such as a two-quark meson or even a three-quark proton. --- doing that reliably for five quarks? We'll get there, but we're not there yet for quite a few years to come.

I'm not an expert on these bound states, and I wasn't aware of "aggregate" as a specific technical term for hadronic bound states. But it might be. There would be the distinction I mentioned above alluding to the scope of the gluon interactions between the five quarks.

Thanks but...
This is too much for me.
I composed a couple more questions.
After chasing into Wikipedia a couple levels on hadrons, confinement, gluon plasma, lattice QCD, I looked back and they looked totally lame.
I'll just lurk and see if anybody else produces enough clarity that I can post without level 5 embarrassment.

My cat likes to watch the pendulum on my long case clock.....
I know how she feels.