Thanks a lot for your feedback and the questions (which I will enjoy answering). You imagination is really cool here!
Particle-antiparticle pairs are supposed to annihilate (like that owl, anti-owl did in discord). What stops a quark and an anti quark pair from immediate annihilation. Is the color force between them repulsive to hold them apart?
This works especially with owls (and @mathowl I guess)... More seriously, there are two items here.
- Annihilation requires quarks and antiquarks to collide. Here, you are talking about quarks and antiquarks that are produced from a collision. They are thus very energetic and move away from the collision point.
- There is also the behaviour of the strong (colour) force. At high energies, it is weaker than at low energies. When a very energetic quark is produced, it will just radiate until it reaches lower energies. After a while (and possibly many radiation), its energy is small enough so that composite state formation can take over (by creating extra quark-antiquark pairs from the vaccuum thanks to quantum effects).
Is it known that decay time of a known particle can change when they form a composite particle. Say if t1 is decay time for particle x and t2 is of particle y. The decay time of xy is either t3 > t1 or t2 if it gets stable, or t4<t1 or t2 if it becomes more unstable? Is this what you think is happening with toponium, that it is getting more stable as a composite particle? Or you were able to see an even 10-25s small?
Here there is no decay time of toponium because it does not exist. We see the effect of a bound state without having a real one. That's the (quantum field theory) magic behind it.
I hope this clarifies, although I am unsure I have fully answered the questions. Feel free to come back to me where needed.
Wow. Well thanks for the explanation. Let's see of I got this right. So itsince they are created in a pair formation, their initial state is moving away from each other. Also given that the strong force is weak at high energy, the quark and anti-quark don't come close enough.
Well a virtual particle showing it's effects! I mean I never though you can actually feel effects of something that didn't exist. Now what I am going to say may sound naive, but then my understanding of quantum physics is limited to very basics, so do forgive me. How does this magic exist? I mean something that never really existed, how can their effects pop into existence and become measurable? I know, I would need to read up on QFT probably to understand this. But is there a simple explanation that I can read/watch to wrap my head around this, which seems to be blown right now! 😁