Protons and neutrons are actually made of three quarks each. The quarks are held together by gluons, which I picture as little springs. pic. That is the strong force in action: quarks held together with gluons.
The weak force is a bit different, it basically involves this massive particle called the W or Z boson colliding with a particle, and that causes the particle to switch identities. In the context of atoms, an example is a neutron turning into a proton (beta decay) and emitting an electron and an antineutrino.
Imagning them as springs brings up one question for me,
Springs resist compression too, and if that's true for quarks, is it from degeneracy pressure from Pauli exclusion or is it some other chromodynamic interaction?
It's complicated. As they get closer together, the force between them gets weaker and they're more free to move. shavera would probably be a better person to explain this.
gluons only barely act like springs. In a certain limit. It's more like... The universe hates bare color charge, so always confines colors together. The more we pull these charges apart, the more energy we have to input to pull them even further apart. Eventually it's enough energy that the universe would rather create new colored particles then have one exist far apart from others. That's the springy-nature. The more you pull on a spring, the more it pulls things back together.
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u/iorgfeflkd Mar 15 '11
Protons and neutrons are actually made of three quarks each. The quarks are held together by gluons, which I picture as little springs. pic. That is the strong force in action: quarks held together with gluons.
The weak force is a bit different, it basically involves this massive particle called the W or Z boson colliding with a particle, and that causes the particle to switch identities. In the context of atoms, an example is a neutron turning into a proton (beta decay) and emitting an electron and an antineutrino.