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Contemporary Art Archive - Tbilisi

Archive of Academic Writings

2021 Edition of the Project is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Youth of Georgia

The past returned into future is the hallutination of the childhoods physical pain in present

Video

Zurab Arabidze

2015

Virtual particles

Virtual particles are short-lived unobservable particles arising in a vacuum and during collisions or decays of particles. In collisions and decays of particles, virtual particles play the role of carriers of interactions. In quantum theory, the interactions and mutual transformations of particles are described as the birth or absorption of virtual particles by a free particle. So, for example, an electron gives birth and absorbs virtual photons.

Two simple processes involving virtual particles are shown in the figure. The virtual particles on the left are the electron, positron and photon. They are simultaneously born in a vacuum in the left node and then disappear in the right. The figure on the right illustrates the interaction of two real electrons through the exchange of a virtual photon playing the role of a carrier of electromagnetic interaction.

The appearance of any virtual particle violates the law of conservation of energy by a certain value ΔЕ, however, such violations are allowed by quantum mechanics during the time intervals Δt allowed by the uncertainty relation ΔЕΔt> ћ (ћ = h / 2π, h is the Planck constant). During the time intervals Δt <ћ / ΔЕ, these disturbances are fundamentally unobservable, as are the intermediate particles themselves, which are therefore called virtual. At the moment of disappearance (absorption) of a virtual particle, the energy balance is restored.

For a virtual particle, the relation of the special theory of relativity between the total energy E, momentum vec_p and mass m: E2 = p2c2 + m2c4 is not satisfied. So, a virtual photon can have a zero momentum, i.e. rest, which is excluded for the observed photon. Almost all physical processes occurring at high energies and at distance scales <10-8 cm are based on the emission and absorption of virtual particles.

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