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Concept
Yukawa potential
Summary
In particle, atomic and condensed matter physics, a Yukawa potential (also called a screened Coulomb potential) is a potential named after the Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa. The potential is of the form:
where is a magnitude scaling constant, i.e. is the amplitude of potential, m is the mass of the particle, r is the radial distance to the particle, and α is another scaling constant, so that is the approximate range. The potential is monotonically increasing in r and it is negative, implying the force is attractive. In the SI system, the unit of the Yukawa potential is (1/meters).
The Coulomb potential of electromagnetism is an example of a Yukawa potential with the factor equal to 1, everywhere. This can be interpreted as saying that the photon mass m is equal to 0. The photon is the force-carrier between interacting, charged particles.
In interactions between a meson field and a fermion field, the constant is equal to the gauge coupling constant between those fields. In the case of the nuclear force, the fermions would be a proton and another proton or a neutron.
Prior to Hideki Yukawa's 1935 paper, physicists struggled to explain the results of James Chadwick's atomic model, which consisted of positively charged protons and neutrons packed inside of a small nucleus, with a radius on the order of 10−14 meters. Physicists knew that electromagnetic forces at these lengths would cause these protons to repel each other and for the nucleus to fall apart. Thus came the motivation for further explaining the interactions between elementary particles. In 1932, Werner Heisenberg proposed a "Platzwechsel" (migration) interaction between the neutrons and protons inside the nucleus, in which neutrons were composite particles of protons and electrons. These composite neutrons would emit electrons, creating an attractive force with the protons, and then turn into protons themselves. When, in 1933 at the Solvay Conference, Heisenberg proposed his interaction, physicists suspected it to be of either two forms:
on account of its short-range.
Official source
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