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Re: Forces



I never liked the word "force" when applied to the strong and weak
interactions, because these interactions are short-range and not
easily visualized classically. For the strong interaction there
is more or less an effective long-range potential which is always
attractive, and at still longer ranges there's the pion exchange
process between baryons which is also always attractive. But at
small length scales the strong interaction becomes much more like
electromagnetism and therefore can be repulsive as well, in some
sense. For the weak interaction, the large mass of the exchanged
bosons means that there's no long-range interaction at all. Still,
the exchanged bosons have spin 1, and behave a lot like photons
at sufficiently short length scales (high energies). So if you
demand an answer, I'll say the weak interaction can be attractive
or repulsive, depending on the "charge" of the particles involved.

Really, though, I should just tell you to compute the cross-section
for your desired process and quit asking questions. :)

-dan