Concept
Virtual particle
Related concepts (33)
Negative energy
Negative energy is a concept used in physics to explain the nature of certain fields, including the gravitational field and various quantum field effects. Gravitational energy Gravitational energy, or gravitational potential energy, is the potential energy a massive object has because it is within a gravitational field. In classical mechanics, two or more masses always have a gravitational potential. Conservation of energy requires that this gravitational field energy is always negative, so that it is zero when the objects are infinitely far apart.
Self-energy
In quantum field theory, the energy that a particle has as a result of changes that it causes in its environment defines self-energy , and represents the contribution to the particle's energy, or effective mass, due to interactions between the particle and its environment. In electrostatics, the energy required to assemble the charge distribution takes the form of self-energy by bringing in the constituent charges from infinity, where the electric force goes to zero.
Deep inelastic scattering
In particle physics, deep inelastic scattering is the name given to a process used to probe the insides of hadrons (particularly the baryons, such as protons and neutrons), using electrons, muons and neutrinos. It was first attempted in the 1960s and 1970s and provided the first convincing evidence of the reality of quarks, which up until that point had been considered by many to be a purely mathematical phenomenon. It is an extension of Rutherford scattering to much higher energies of the scattering particle and thus to much finer resolution of the components of the nuclei.