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Concept
Yukawa interaction
Summary
In particle physics, Yukawa's interaction or Yukawa coupling, named after Hideki Yukawa, is an interaction between particles according to the Yukawa potential. Specifically, it is a scalar field (or pseudoscalar field) φ and a Dirac field ψ of the type
The Yukawa interaction was developed to model the strong force between hadrons. A Yukawa interaction is thus used to describe the nuclear force between nucleons mediated by pions (which are pseudoscalar mesons).
A Yukawa interaction is also used in the Standard Model to describe the coupling between the Higgs field and massless quark and lepton fields (i.e., the fundamental fermion particles). Through spontaneous symmetry breaking, these fermions acquire a mass proportional to the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field. This Higgs-fermion coupling was first described by Steven Weinberg in 1967 to model lepton masses.
Yukawa potential
If two fermions interact through a Yukawa interaction mediated by a Yukawa particle of mass , the potential between the two particles, known as the Yukawa potential, will be:
which is the same as a Coulomb potential except for the sign and the exponential factor. The sign will make the interaction attractive between all particles (the electromagnetic interaction is repulsive for same electrical charge sign particles). This is explained by the fact that the Yukawa particle has spin zero and even spin always results in an attractive potential. (It is a non-trivial result of quantum field theory that the exchange of even-spin bosons like the pion (spin 0, Yukawa force) or the graviton (spin 2, gravity) results in forces always attractive, while odd-spin bosons like the gluons (spin 1, strong interaction), the photon (spin 1, electromagnetic force) or the rho meson (spin 1, Yukawa-like interaction) yields a force that is attractive between opposite charge and repulsive between like-charge.) The negative sign in the exponential gives the interaction a finite effective range, so that particles at great distances will hardly interact any longer (interaction forces fall off exponentially with increasing separation).
Official source
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