About 99% Mass of Protons and Neutrons Keeps Going In and Out of Existence

Nearly 1% mass of Protons and Neutrons is attributed to the mass of the three quarks that constitutes them and the remaining 99% is attributed to the strong nuclear force that binds these Quarks together. The Strong Nuclear Force is carried by a field of Gluons (virtual particles), which keeps fluctuating in and out of existence. The energy of these fluctuations is what renders the remaining mass of Protons and Neutrons and since together these Nucleons account for nearly all the mass of normal matter, it can be declared that close to 99% mass of normal matter keeps going in and out of existence. Equations of quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, describes the strong nuclear force. In most cases, these equations are too difficult to solve. Consequentially a new approach called Lattice QCD was developed which models smooth space and time as a grid of pixels. This allows for creation of close computer simulations of Strong Nuclear Force.

Virtual Gluons, Virtual Quarks and Anti Quarks are constituents of Quantum vacuum. Virtual Quark-Anti Quark pairs can appear suddenly and for an instant transform a proton into a more exotic particle. In fact, the proton as we know it is the combination of all these possibilities going at once. Virtual quarks make the calculations much more complicated, involving a matrix of more than 10,000 trillion numbers, says team member Stephan Dürr of the John von Neumann Institute for Computing in Jülich, Germany. A calculation involving that much data is beyond the capability of computers we have currently.

To calculate the mass of protons and neutrons using computer simulations, Dürr’s team used months of time on parallel computer network at Jülich. The network can handle 200 teraflops or 200 trillion arithmetical calculations per second. Dürr says- “We spent an enormous effort to make sure our code would make optimum use of the machine”. Without accounting for the Virtual Quarks, the simulations got proton mass wrong by about 10%, with them, Dürr gets a figure within 2% of the value measured by experiments.

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References:
1) https://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.3599.pdf

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