Is the neutron actually less massive than the proton is?!

Quote from RobertBryant

How has QCD survived for over 50 years..

Quote from Curbina

the deuteron model should be revised

Quote from Edo

due to the presence of the nuclear electron using 0.78 MeV,

The cartoon says"where the light is"

Perhaps it is here ..

and Jurg is offering tutorials with tours of the Alps in a "Quantum" package.

certainly the errors in quantities are many orders of magnitude less as compared to QCD..

eg 0.023/2.2 Mevs for deuterium ..accurate to 10 sf..

cf 11+_17 Mev accurate to 1 sf?

.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347528262_The_proton_electron_structure_its_resonances_and_fusion_products?enrichId=rgreq-187cc51fbfb45ce81785cc2d19eb5e9e-XXX&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzM0NzUyODI2MjtBUzo5NzEyOTkxNzAwMjk1NzBAMTYwODU4NzE3NjgxOA%3D%3D&el=1_x_2&_esc=publicationCoverPdf

Quote from Curbina

I agree, very well crafted thinking from evidence to theory, and not the other way around.

From the paper conclusions:

Conclusions on scientific issue:

We have demonstrated that in the deuteron, the neutron is dissociated into a positive charge distribution corresponding to a proton and a negative charge distribution that extends over the whole nucleus, and acts as a cohesive shell. Thus, the deuteron is in fact composed of two protons wrapped by the distribution of the negative electric charge, coming from the dissociation of the neutron. It is crucial not to confound the electric charge with the electron, which is a specific quantum state of the electric charge. In fact, all charged particles, such as the muon, the pion, the kaon, the proton, etc., correspond to different quantum states of the electric charge, each having a specific structural charge distribution defined by a wavefunction.

Obviously, something has not been wholly suitably conceived in regard to the atomic nucleus. In order to solve the problem, the structure of the neutron must be reconsidered. Consequently, the deuteron model should be revised in accordance with the experimental proofs here provided, supporting a two-proton nucleus and a cohesive shell. The great advantage of this model is that it offers a simple explanation of the nuclear cohesion, without calling for an exchange of imaginary gluons, but instead just resorting on the sharing of the long-known integer electric charge, which acts as a bonding carrier in accordance with the extended quantum state acquired. By extension, this model can be applied to all atomic nuclei and it can be considered that the neutron is always dissociated into a positive charge distribution corresponding to a proton and a negative charge distribution which extends over the whole nucleus, acting as a cohesive shell.

Conclusions on sociological issue:

There is no doubt that proponents of the standard model will ignore these data on the symmetry of the distribution of the structural charge of the deuteron or these will be interpreted in a biased way in order to artificially adapt them to their model. Supporters of the standard model avoid any debate to compare and weight different points of view, and for now two decades, the orbital model presented here, published in 1999 [11], has been ignored. Moreover, they have lost all self-criticism and interpret any experimental result in total submission to the mainstream model. They are unable to have a critical view of the deep artificiality of Chromo-Quantum Dynamics and even less to consider a different approach to the nature of elementary particles.
Supporters of the standard model do not know or do not want to reconsider their dogmatic attitude and open themselves to other points of view. They ignore or avoid any debate that may lead to a critical view of their dogma. They are completely subjected to highly speculative mathematical interpretations that lead them to have a very conditioned and narrow view of their fields of study.

Moreover, data not matching with the standard model are neglected. The standard model maintains itself through an incessant propaganda “selling” skewed virtues and claiming that it is the best existing model. With such an unfair attitude, there is no doubt they will keep inhibiting the progress on elementary particle physics, being unwilling to reconsider their dogmatic attitude and to open up to other points of view.

Nevertheless, at present there is a growing number of theoretical physicists who aspire to a "beyond" the standard model. This euphemistic "beyond" shows that in reality they are aware of the fact that this model has long been in a dead end and they are eager to find a way out of a mistaken and sterile orientation, which obstructs an effective progress of the physics of elementary particles and a better understanding of the atomic nucleus. Even so, until now they have not reach to free themselves from the fanciful conceptual foundations of the Chromo-Quantum Dynamics and go in search of a more realistic approach.

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330468167_About_the_symmetry_of_the_deuteron_structural_charge_density_distribution

I wonder if THHuxleynew has seen this.

Quote from RobertBryant

QCD modelling hasn't got very far..in fifty years since 1973

Yamazaki et al...

"An encouraging finding is that ∆E = 27.7(9.6) MeV
'.. agrees with the experimental value of 28.3 MeV."

what PhD students would bother to use QCD ... given 28+-10 Mev accuracy

2 sf?

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0912.1383.pdf

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You can find regimes where QCD modelling has not got very far - true.

Here is the problem:

In formulation, QCD and QED are strikingly similar. Both are gauge-invariant quantum field theories. The key difference is that photons in QED are neutral; so they can’t interact directly with each other. The gluon is the QCD analog of the photon; it carries the strong force between quarks. But quite unlike photons, gluons do carry color charge, the analog of electric charge. So gluons interact directly with each other as well as with quarks. (See the article by Frank Wilczek in Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 53 8 2000 22 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1310117. August 2000, page 22 .)

That seemingly innocent change has dramatic consequences for phenomenology. It is the root of QCD’s daunting complexity. Electrons, positrons, and photons can be separated and isolated at macroscopic distances. Quarks, antiquarks, and gluons cannot. This prohibition, called color confinement, assures that all the elementary particles (the hadrons) composed of quarks, antiquarks, and gluons come in precise color-neutral combinations. Loosely speaking, this means that they come either in quark–antiquark pairs (the mesons) or in triplets of quarks (the baryons). Several recently discovered “pentaquark” baryons appear to combine a quark triplet with a quark–antiquark pair (see page 19 of this issue.)

Why only color-neutral combinations? In QCD, quarks can have three colors. Conventionally, they are labeled red, blue, and green, but of course they have nothing to do with optics. Antiquarks have the corresponding anticolors. Triplets of quarks containing equal portions of the three colors are color neutral.

Try to pry loose one of the three valence quarks in a proton. Before going much farther than the radius of the proton (about 1 fm or 10⁻¹³ cm), you’ve done enough work to create a new quark–antiquark pair. Pairs promptly appear, choose new partners, and you find a meson in one hand and a proton or neutron in the other. No isolated quarks!

However in many other regimes the calculations converge better, and we have got better at doing very complex calculations

2004 (30 years after it was formulated) lattice QCD really starts to make a mark

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The most important theoretical advance in recent years has been the development of improved actions, that is, improved methods of formulating QCD on the lattice. As in classical field theory, the QCD action is the integral, over space and time, of the Lagrangian density. In lattice calculations, this four-dimensional integral is approximated by summing over discrete lattice points in spacetime.

With substantial computational resources at NSF and DOE national centers during the past three years, lattice gauge theorists have used an improved “staggered fermion” (ISF) action to generate, and make publicly available, a large set of gauge-field configurations (see box 2). ⁵ Staggered fermion actions, introduced by John Kogut and Leonard Susskind in 1976, are so called because the algorithm spreads the fermion spins over adjacent lattice points.

The newly available gauge-field configurations include the vacuum-polarization (quark loop) effects of u, d, and s quarks. Several lattice-QCD collaborations, working together, ⁶ have recently used these configurations to determine a variety of hadronic quantities to an unprecedented accuracy of 3%. All of those quantities had been measured previously in the laboratory. Figure 2 plots the ratio of the simulated value to the experimental one for each observable. The only inputs were a few experimentally known hadron masses that were used to determine the lattice spacing and the masses of five of the quark flavors. The t quark is too heavy to contribute. The rest is pure prediction.

Quote from Curbina

https://www.researchgate.net/p…arge_density_distribution

I wonder if THHuxleynew has seen this.

Sigh...

You have not been reading my posts - or you would know that what I said (and linked) shows the straw man that this paper argues against.

The distribution of the structural charge density of the deuteron is examined and its symmetry is analyzed on the basis of experimental data obtained from electron scattering experiments, in which the total symmetry of the deuteron structure is evidenced. Since according to the conventional nuclear model the deuteron is formed of a neutron and a proton, whose structural charge density is substantially different, it follows that the juxtaposition of the distribution of their charge density is asymmetrical, thus being in deep disagreement with that of the deuteron which is symmetrical. This incongruence is thus analyzed. The conventional model of a proton juxtaposed to a neutron is unable to provide a credible explanation of the symmetry of the deuteron charge distribution since it is composed of two different particles, one neutral and the other one charged, and with a highly dissimilar structural charge density. Consequently, an explanation for the structural symmetry of deuteron is proposed, based on a revised approach.

The "conventional nuclear model" is of course only an approximation: and both (standard model) theory and experiment show that (quite reasonably) the constituent quarks in a nucleus bind to each other tightly beyond the nucleon triplets. Also the approach here loses the fact that those constituent quarks - even if binding together mainly as nucleons, have probability distributions, so that classic analysis cannot predict the resulting symmetry.

This description of the deuteron is based on the authors previous description of a neutron (section 3) and depends on it.

But that is wrong: I have previously given a fundamental experimental reason why electrons cannot be localised to a nucleus. The size/momentum characteristics of electrons have been studied in great details experimentally and correspond exactly to the theory.

Sardin can be excused for not explaining this discrepancy because his writing (as read here) excludes any possible QM modelling of the nucleon constituents. It is as though he is stuck in the 19th Century and QM not yet accepted. Even Einstein - who hated it - had to admit all those experiments.

I find the credibility gap here extraordinary. It is as though people here look at a complex proof, and wonder it. Then, when the first bit contains a clear contradiction, and this is pointed out, they juts ignore that on the grounds that the rest of it is so compelling.

Unfortunately - in physics an in maths - if you start off with a contradiction clearly unreal - you can prove anything.

Finally - the actual (experientally measured) structures, even of neutrons, are very complex. So proposing a simple structure (even if not theoretically flawed) does not work:

New insights into the structure of the neutron

An international research team has measured neutron form factors with previously unattained precision.

www.sciencedaily.com

So - in summary - criticism of the standard model is invalid because:

• The standard models predictions for nuclear structure are complex, and cannot be determined without QM, not considered here

• The model considered here is contrary to experiment (known properties of electron)

• The model considered here is contrary to experiment (even neutrons, let alone deuterons, have experimentally measured v complex structure)
• The model here does not show the correct quark-like constituents as shown experimentally by deep inelastic scattering and otehr ex

I am not a great person to be reviewing this (not an expert). But I know enough about the review process that such major flaws would need to be addressed by the author before it was published in any non-predatory journal. Rossi would take it, though.

As for those 3 quarks. It is only 3 quarks in one sense of the word. Perhaps this analogy can give some idea of teh complexity but also emergent simplicity of the standard model

(Virtual) gluons are part of nucleons in the same sense that (virtual) photons are part of the atom as a whole. You don't need to talk about them because they are implied in the strong and electro-magnetic interaction respectively, and unlike the electrons and protons and quarks, they are uncountable - that is, a protium atom always has one electron and one proton made of three quarks, but there isn't even any meaningful number of the virtual photons and gluons. Don't think of virtual particles as "this could have been a real gluon, but isn't" - they are excitations in their corresponding quantum field that don't follow the rules for particles in that field.

Don't try too hard finding a "yes-no" answer to anything in physics - most of the answers are more like "Yes, but...". There can be hundreds of implied conditions in anything you learn about anything (one good reason why you need to slowly build up on strong foundations, rather than just skipping to some random interesting physics topic) - e.g. do relative velocities combine additively? Yes (as long as we're talking about e.g. cars on a road). No (if you're talking about e.g. high energy particles hitting Earth's atmosphere). This exists in probably every single physics question, so the ", but..." is always implied - little need to keep carefully reminding people of it beyond their introduction to science in general.

For the first part, I'd just add to the already existing great answers: three quarks aren't the only explanation, of course. Another way of looking at the problem is that the (e.g.) proton is made out of thousands of quarks and anti-quarks that are constantly created and annihilated, and if you add them all up at any given instant, you get three more quarks than anti-quarks. Except for their energy (which contributes to the mass of the proton as a system), they almost entirely cancel out except for the three "extra" quarks. There are many ways of looking at this picture as well - some consider the "cancelling" quarks to be real particles, some consider them to be virtual particles and some see an interplay between virtual quarks and gluons. Needless to say, all those alternatives predict the exact same outcomes for any typical chemistry question - we're talking about differences that are either tiny for any practical purposes, or possibly even just a mostly meaningless semantic debate (does a falling tree make a sound if nobody hears it?).

THH

(Sardin)

In addition,according to the QCD, the distribution of the proton charge density should have two peaks, onepositive corresponding to the two 2/3 q+ quarks and the other negative corresponding to the 1/3 q-quark. Moreover, the positive peak should be four times larger than the negative peak, which isincongruent with fig.4 showing only a positive part, but in contrast it is in full agreement with the model of the proton formed by one full positive charge. The fact that the proton has not two charge distributions, one positive and one negative, as the neutron, is clearly incoherent with their quarkcomposition, since both having + and - quarks.

(PDF) About the symmetry of the deuteron structural charge density distribution. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/p…arge_density_distribution [accessed Oct 14 2022].

Forgive me for finding these things less clear. To determine the overall time-averaged charge distribution of a proton you need to sum the wave functions of the constituent quarks and all the virtual quarks generated in their binding - integrated over time,

You need something like this:

https://gsalam.web.cern.ch/gsalam/repository/talks/2009-Bautzen-lecture2.pdf

Why on earth should that predict a positive and negative peak? Weird.

And if you try something much simpler - you have to explain all those very, very, many experiments inconsistent with such a model.

THH

Well THHuxleynew , you circle back to the "this is wrong because of the standard model" argument. We may have to simply agree that this is an unresolvable impasse.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The standard models predictions for nuclear structure are complex, and cannot be determined without QM, not considered here

As usual a clownery. Experiments = physics- Theory (QED,QCD) = fantasy...

Quote from RobertBryant

It doesn't take a PhD in physics to understand that something is wrong in QCD

The actual binding energy of deuterium is known with great accuracy ,

about 6sf,,, 2.224644(34) MeV..

The QCD result is 11+-17.. 2.22 is included...

It's hard to find the red point on the diagram.

Question.How can a scientist get a result published which says that

"the QCD mass of the deuterium isotope is 11+_ 17 Mev

when the deuterium mass is known to 6/7 significant figures..

2.224644(34) MeV..????

Answer. Nuclear physics has become a mutual adulation club

where every now and then a clever idiot gets awarded a Nobel Prize,,

Its a clever asylum where outsiders such as George Sardin who say

"the emperor has no clothes" are persona non grata

Quote from RobertBryant

a clever idiot

David Gross...

He's clever... he got $ 1 million for BS..

"QCD solves the problem" ???????????????????????????????

Dont ask David how QCD predicts the mass of the deuteron..

11+_17 Mev

Perhaps a funeral or real dementia will save the inevitable facepalm

Quote from RobertBryant

how QCD predicts the mass of the deuteron

Grossman..TM 10.14

"People have now" it's a true tour-de-force" calculated from first principles using lattice QCD.

the proton-neutron mass difference to point..??????.. .. and it's quite astounding"

Grossman was interrupted by Unzicker after"point"

So, what was the accuracy of the proton neutron mass difference p-n values?

PROTON 938.272088 Mev

NEUTRON 939.565420 Mev

subtraction P-N= -1.293332 Mev

QCD (2014) 1.5+_0.4 actually written as 1.51(16)(23)

So in answer to Edo's question " Is the neutron lighter than the proton"

according to QCD. the proton IS lighter than the neutron by

1.5 Mevs on average which is within 17 % of the measurable value(1.293332)

with an accuracy of 0.4 Mevs, which is 30% of the measurable value.

Another question...

Is energy released during fusion of two deuteriums to Helium?

Answer.. QCD is unsure based on the (in)accuracy (55Mev)

of the current binding energy calculations

however,,

"this will get better and better over the years of course" Grossman TM 11.23

Maybe in a 1000 years QCD can explain the makeup

of the n-p mass difference or neutron excess mass (1.293332 Mev)

to an accuracy of 1 ev..

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.4088.pdf

Significant Figures and False Precision - Journal of Phase Equilibria and Diffusion

link.springer.com

When subtracting the masses of the electron and the proton from the neutron's gives almost exactly the free neutron decay energy, the above overly complex attempts at explaining the p-n mass difference seem entirely off the mark.

Some people here like to make this overly complex. Complexity is fine if it leads somewhere. Most of this goes nowhere.

Perhaps THHnew can give us exact numbers for the electron's size and momentum. Nailing that down would be a big help.

The experiment at SLAC giving us the quark model should have also given a model for the electron. Why didn't it? Also, that may have been a case of apples versus oranges. A very small and heavy proton colliding with a very large and light electron. The electron might also have an open structure such that the proton occasionally passes through the electron. Not having a sound model for the electron puts the experimental conclusions in question.

Quote from can

Neutron – Electron – Proton mass
0.782333
MeV

You mean p-n-e?

Lets say QED predicts a value of the electron of 0.51 Mev....0.51+_0.05

By QCD/QED p-n-e =1.5+_0.4 -(.0.51+_0.05)

=1.o+_0.4

Yes .. the so-called free neutron decay energy (0.782343) ?(by rest mass delta)

is within the QCD/QED range of 0.6-1.4 Mev

but is also known as excess energy.. and is released

soon after a neutron separates out from a more stable isotope

mostly as Beta decay electron with energy..

0.782±0.013 MeV..

Quote from Edo

he released gamma ray (2.225MeV or so) from fusion of two H1 atoms, or reversed, the need for that 2.225MeV to break up a deuteron, is attributed to the neutron mass. At least that is my case in point. Only looking at the free neutron decay we fail to see the larger picture,

The larger picture from the current form of SO(4) theory is below

The inaccuracy is much less than 1 eV (in contrast to QCD...0.4Mev ---55 Mev))

Notice that there at least 5 calculable components of the neutron mass

and of the deuteron mass..2224572.77 eV

the neutron excess energy appears to be made up largely of

proton 4Dpotential 1D m_ppoand the electron relativistic mass..

Quote from RobertBryant

the neutron excess energy appears to be made up largely of

proton 4Dpotential 1D mppoand the electron relativistic mass..

Be aware that this is always what goes away. This formula tells us that the e-p bond is just done by removing one electron internal charge mass, what what we expect as the electron is just EM flux inside a neutron.

What you see in Deuterium is the full release of an electro weak bond mass. This orbit is unoccupied in the neutron but the coupling still exists.

Quote from RobertBryant

Question.How can a scientist get a result published which says that

"the QCD mass of the deuterium isotope is 11+_ 17 Mev

when the deuterium mass is known to 6/7 significant figures..

2.224644(34) MeV..????

Answer. Nuclear physics has become a mutual adulation club

where every now and then a clever idiot gets awarded a Nobel Prize,,

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Because this is an ab initio calculation showing the merits and demerits of lattice QCD here. There are many more accurate calculations from QCD of neutron mass, but without clear bounds of the errors:

Perhaps more curiosity into why these results have large bounds would lead readers here to be more interested and less dismissive?

Quote from Curbina

Well THHuxleynew , you circle back to the "this is wrong because of the standard model" argument. We may have to simply agree that this is an unresolvable impasse.

No. I was deliberately not doing that. I was saying it is wrong because it conflicts directly with experiments. The experimental properties of the electron I allude to have no dependence on the standard model and have been discovered over 100 years - in fact they came first and forced theorists to develop QM - much as they hated it - probably for the same reasons people here hate it - unless you are a mathematician and very familiar with all the ways the maths affects the physics any thinking person would find QM bizzarre and counter-intuitive. (It does not help that QM scales are so far from macroscopic human ones that our physical notion of causality - which seems so definite - approximates classical mechanics).

Quote from GRMattson

Some people here like to make this overly complex. Complexity is fine if it leads somewhere. Most of this goes nowhere.

Perhaps THHnew can give us exact numbers for the electron's size and momentum. Nailing that down would be a big help.

The experiment at SLAC giving us the quark model should have also given a model for the electron. Why didn't it?

GRMattson. I think you are being a bit arrogant here, in dismissing the many ways that QM (QED) physics predicts experiments? I am pretty certain you are not familiar with them all - or even most of them. You are talking about electrons where QED is a complete calculable theory, and QED results are exquisitely accurate and correct.

One reason I believe you have not read the vast amount of quantum electrodynamics - or even simple quantum mechanics - describing with very high predictivity all of the electron experiments is that your question to me makes no sense. Electrons have neither fixed size nor fixed momentum

Experiment shows:

(1) if you constrain the momentum - you need a larger size to contain the wave function

(2) if you constrain the size (e.g. a small potential well) the ground state has a high momentum.

(3) HUP (or one of the many variants of this) gives an approximate answer to the limit

(4) exact QM calculations (no QED needed here) give correct limits for particular potential wells

(5) The PC you are reading this post on is based exactly on those calculations - since for the last 10 years our semiconductors have been designed in a size range where electronic quantum effects such as tunnelling are very significant.

(6) the minimum nuclear electron energy can be calculated simply if you assume the electron is non-relativistic as here. (It goes up for smaller nuclei, so for a single neutron it is 30X larger than this large anyway figure of 15GeV. Given the energy equivalent of the neutron rest mass is approx 1GeV you can see an electron, constrained to a neutron, has 100X the mass of a neutron! The relativistic calculation is more complex but similarly leads to an unfeasible energy. You need only QM (or QED, for relativistic case) not the standard model, to calculate this.

I am sure many on this site see me as arrogant posting these rebuttals of what you post.

Look at it from my POV.

People here come along, and obviously not having read the theories, nor the experiments they were developed over 100 years to explain, say with authority that various fundamental theories: QM, QED, QCD, standard model, are obviously wrong, or "not useful". They trash the millions of people who have studied for 4 years or more (like my sister, and several of my friends) to contribute - in however tiny a way - to particle physics research. They use arguments based on classical mechanics that were contradicted 100 years ago where QM descriptions of the same phenomena are provably equivalent to the classical model at normal scales but provide different answers and insight at quantum scales. Those QM descriptions have gone on to accurately predict and describe many corners of physics and technology in ways impossibly classically or semi-classically.

That they do this, not bothering first to understand even at the most basic level the stuff they trash, is the height of arrogance.

Learning QM at the level needed to understand why electrons constrained to something the size of a neutron would have such a high energy does not need 4 years work - probably a week or two on top of 1st year uni maths and physics. The equations you use underlie experiments and technology that make the modern world - they are very highly predictive. They do not depend on the standard model or QCD (both of which are more contentious for various good reasons - although they have very high predictivity so you need something that mirrors them closely and is better to replace them).

The experiment at SLAC giving us the quark model should have also given a model for the electron. Why didn't it?

There is no "model" for the electron because it has in every experiment we have ever done, and there are a lot, looked like an elementary particle. In the standard model, like a quark, it is a lepton and elementary.

THH

Quote from RobertBryant

The larger picture from the current form of SO(4) theory is below

deep inelastic scattering...

Although, if SO4 theory approximates to SM at level of predicting quarks and all other leptons, togetehr with their experimentally known properties, I will forgive it?

From the amount of SM trashing I was expecting it did not...

Quote from THHuxleynew

if SO4 theory approximates to SM at level of predicting quarks

This sounds like the last word from somebody suffering from brain amputation. There are no quarks. There never have been quarks even CERN admits that quarks are no particles. Quarks are a mathematical concept to somehow correlate scattering results that tell 0 = zero about the nucleus internals.