Chapter 606 - Unifying Nuclear Power
Chapter 606: Unifying Nuclear Power
Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
The f*ck?
God Lu?
He’s my idol!
When Zhang Zhiongqing looked at the person standing up, his glasses nearly dropped to the ground.
When he remembered that this big name was listening to his lecture, he was shocked and happy; it was almost like he had won the lottery. He was shocked that he didn’t notice Lu Zhou was in the classroom, and he was happy that he could brag to people that he gave a lecture to a Nobel Prize winner.
However, even though Zhang Zhiongqing felt a mix of emotions, Lu Zhou was emotionless.
Classrooms were one of the places for academic exchange.
Back when he was in Princeton, he often asked his students to lecture for him.
In his opinion, academic exchanges shouldn’t be about honor or status.
“Professor Lu, please go ahead.” Professor Zhang made a gesture and respectfully gave up the stage.
“Don’t need to be so polite, I just have some ideas.”
Lu Zhou looked at the professor move to the side and smiled.
This formality was wasting too much time.
He wasn’t a person who liked to waste time on formality.
Lu Zhou walked next to the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk.
“This isn’t a question that undergraduate students can solve since it involves an understanding of quantum chromodynamics and also a deeper understanding of functional analysis.”
Lu Zhou paused for two seconds and said, “But actually, it’s not as difficult as it seems.”
Lu Zhou wrote on the blackboard with a piece of chalk and began to talk about his thought process.
“Using field theory, make a Feynman diagram, then use the Feynman rule to calculate the scattering amplitude, we obtain…”
[iM=(ig2/|p’-p|2+mφ2)2m^ss’·2mδ^rr’]
[…]
“The mφ denotes the mass of the corresponding boson, and g comes from the coupling constant in the interaction Lagrangian. If we combine this with Professor Zhang’s previous calculation, V(q) can be obtained from the scattering section…”
[V(q)=-g2/(|q|2+mφ2)]
Lu Zhou put down the piece of chalk and looked at the students in the classroom. Some students were muddled, some students were listening intently. He smiled and said, “This part is the simple part, but the next step we’ll have to use some tricks.”
Everyone: “…”
F*ck sake!
How is this simple?
Zhang Zhiongqing looked at the blackboard as well. He was also amazed.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand the calculations, but he couldn’t believe that someone could actually calculate these things on the spot.
Do these people not take time to do calculations in their brains?
This is amazing…
Lu Zhou didn’t stop. He turned to face the blackboard as he continued to speak while writing, “Then we do an inverse Fourier transform on it!”
The chalk sliding on the blackboard was getting faster and faster, and Zhang Zhiongqing was more and more amazed. As for the students, they were looking at the blackboard with a blank look on their faces. Even the genius students who had finished the entire textbook were staring in disbelief at the complex calculations.
Lu Zhou didn’t notice their expressions; he was completely immersed in his own world.
Admittedly, these were basic things, but they weren’t basic enough to appear on an undergraduate class exam.
However, the more Lu Zhou thought about this problem, the more steps he wrote on the blackboard. His train of thought became clearer and clearer.
Why does the strong interaction force only work at short distances?
To put it in other words, what makes nucleon form a nucleus only at short distances?
The answer is obvious…
[…]
[V(r)=-g2/4πr·e^(-mφr)]
Lu Zhou stopped writing and looked at the equation on the blackboard. He then said, “Electromagnetic interaction is the exchange of photons, and the mass of a photon is zero, so for electromagnetic interaction, V is proportional to 1/r.
“The strong interaction force is the meson acting between the nucleus. The mass is about 200 MeV. With some calculations, we can estimate that only at a distance of 10 to the power of negative 14 meters, can the nucleus force offset the electromagnetic repulsion between protons and cause fusion reactions.”
The first row began to applaud.
Like waves in the ocean, the applause began to spread toward the back of the classroom.
Professor Zhang, who was standing next to him, began to subconsciously clap.
For most university students, this was just an exciting demonstration.
But for a professor like him, he just witnessed a simple solution to explain the strong interaction distance… At least, it was a lot easier than the explanations he had learned before.
He couldn’t believe that this was all done in less than ten minutes.
He was probably the only one who could fully experience this moment.
Lu Zhou was still on stage.
Even though the classroom was filled with applause, Lu Zhou, who was standing in front of the blackboard, was immersed in his own mind. He didn’t even notice when the applause stopped.
He already finished all of the calculations for the simple problem.
However, he wasn’t only thinking about this one problem.
According to quantum field theory and quantum chromodynamics, the four basic forces and the traditional particles could be unified into one.
For example, during different positions of time and space, the components of an electric field could be constructed as noncommutative operators. When one constructed a Hilbert space in which these operators act, traditional particles, such as electrons, can be reinterpreted as a Dirac fermion, a quantization of the field.
This way, the difference between a field and a particle would disappear.
Was it possible for a simple mathematical equation, like the Weinberg Salam Glashow weak electric unified theory, to describe the electromagnetic interaction, the weak interaction force, and the strong interaction in a unified way?
The answer to this question couldn’t solve the miniaturization of controllable fusion, and it wouldn’t be able to bring any innovation to the existing controllable fusion technology. However, Lu Zhou’s intuition told him that if he could solve this theoretical problem, it might provide him with some clues or ideas…
Of course, solving this problem was not easy.
For example, there was the classic strong interaction force and weak interaction force problem…
After the class bell rang, Lu Zhou was still standing still, as if he was thinking about something.
Seeing how Lu Zhou didn’t react, Zhang Zhiongqing didn’t want to announce that the class was over since he didn’t want to interrupt Lu Zhou’s thought process.
Around two minutes passed by.
Lu Zhou stared at the simple calculations on the blackboard and began to speak to himself, “How would one explain the Yang-Mills existence and mass gap in mathematical terms?”
When Zhang Zhiongqing heard this problem, he was stunned. He blushed like a student and mumbled, “I don’t know.”
“I didn’t ask you, of course you don’t know…”
Lu Zhou spoke to himself and left the classroom, leaving the muddled students and professor behind.
No one could tell him the answer to this problem.
After all, this was one of the most difficult propositions in the field of particle physics. It was about the unified field theory.
This was also one of the internationally recognized Millennium Prize Problems…