In physics, asymptotic freedom is the property of some gauge theories in which the interaction between the particles, such as quarks, becomes arbitrarily weak at ever shorter distances, i.e. length scales that asymptotically converge to zero (or, equivalently, energy scales that become arbitrarily large).

Discovery

The fact that asymptotic freedom is a feature of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the quantum field theory of the interactions of quarks and gluons, was discovered by David Gross, Frank Wilczek, and David Politzer in 1973. For their discovery, Gross, Wilczek and Politzer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004.

Asymptotic freedom implies that in high-energy scattering the quarks move within nucleons, such as the neutron and proton, essentially as free, non-interacting particles, and it allows physicists to calculate the cross sections of various events in particle physics reliably using parton techniques.

The discovery also helped rehabilitate the reputation of quantum field theory (QFT) as a coherent description of particle interactions. Prior to 1973, many theorists suspected that QFT was rendered fundamentally incoherent by the short-distance Landau pole that arose in quantum electrodynamics and some other field theories. Asymptotically free theories, however, lack this Landau pole. The discovery of asymptotic freedom was therefore a key development toward the emergence of a Standard Model of particle physics based on quantum field theory.

(While the Standard Model is not itself entirely asymptotically free, the phenomenon raises the possibility that it could be an effective field theory approximation to an asymptotically free grand unified theory; and since its strong interactions are asymptotically free, any Landau poles in it are banished anyway to a realm far beneath the Planck length.)

Screening and antiscreening

The variation in a physical coupling constant under changes of scale can be understood qualitatively as coming from the action of the field on virtual particles carrying the relevant charge. The Landau pole behavior of QED is a consequence of screening by virtual charged particle-antiparticle pairs, such as electron-positron pairs, in the vacuum. In the vicinity of a charge, the vacuum becomes polarized: virtual particles of opposing charge are attracted to the charge, and virtual particles of like charge are repelled. The net effect is to partially cancel out the field at any finite distance. Getting closer and closer to the central charge, one sees less and less of the effect of the vacuum, and the effective charge increases.

In QCD, the same thing happens with virtual quark-antiquark pairs; they tend to screen the color charge. However, QCD has an additional wrinkle: its force-carrying particles, the gluons, themselves carry color charge, and in a different manner. Roughly speaking, each gluon carries both a color charge and an anti-color charge. The net effect of polarization of virtual gluons in the vacuum is not to screen the field, but to augment it and affect its color. This is sometimes called antiscreening. Getting closer to a quark diminishes the antiscreening effect of the surrounding virtual gluons, so the contribution of this effect would be to weaken the effective charge with decreasing distance.

Since the virtual quarks and the virtual gluons contribute opposite effects, which effect wins out depends on the number of different kinds, or flavors, of quark. For standard QCD with three colors, as long as there are no more than 16 flavors of quark (not counting the antiquarks separately), antiscreening prevails and the theory is asymptotically free. In fact, there are only 6 known quark flavors.

Calculating asymptotic freedom

Asymptotic freedom can be derived by calculating the beta-function describing the variation of the theory's coupling constant under the renormalization group. For sufficiently short distances or large exchanges of momentum (which probe short-distance behavior, roughly because of the inverse relation between a quantum's momentum and wavelength), an asymptotically free theory is amenable to perturbation theory calculations using Feynman diagrams. Such situations are therefore more theoretically tractable than the long-distance, strong-coupling behavior also often present in such theories, which is thought to produce confinement.

Calculating the beta-function is a matter of evaluating Feynman diagrams contributing to the interaction of a quark emitting or absorbing a gluon. In non-abelian gauge theories such as QCD, the existence of asymptotic freedom depends on the gauge group and number of flavors of interacting particles. To lowest nontrivial order, the beta-function in an SU(N) gauge theory with n_f kinds of quark-like particle is

where α is the theory's equivalent of the fine-structure constant, g² / (4π) in the units favored by particle physicists. If this function is negative, the theory is asymptotically free. For SU(3), the color charge gauge group of QCD, the theory is therefore asymptotically free if there are 16 or fewer flavors of quarks.

External link

• Twenty-five years of asymptotic freedom (by David Gross) (Nobel Prize 2004 for this discovery)

References