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Re: A maximum possible acceleration?

Paul Camp wrote:
Actually, gravity can cause a vacuum breakdown too, analogous to the
Klein paradox. This is one way of thinking about Hawking radiation.
Make the gravitational field large enough and you start to create
particle/antiparticle pairs.

I think the vacuum has a bound on the static field strength for all four
interactions. I believe that once the gauge field strength for some
interaction becomes so intense that that the energy density tied up in the
field is greater than approximately the rest energy of a (lowest mass
appropriately charged w.r.t. the interaction) particle/antiparticle pair per
cubic Compton wavelength for the particle, then the vacuum becomes unstable
against pair production. Once this happens the excess field energy goes into
the production of evermore particle/antiparticle pairs rather than into
increasing the field strength. In the case of the EM interaction the
strongest static EM field strength has an energy density comparable to the
rest energy of an electron/positron pair per cubic (electron) Compton
wavelength.

In the case of the Strong interaction the strongest virtual gluon field
strength has an energy density comparable to the rest energy of a u-quark/
u_bar-antiquark pair per cubic (u-quark) Compton wavelength.

I think the case of the Weak interaction is tricky since I think the lightest
flavored particles (i.e. neutrinos & antineutrinos) can't be created by
themselves as a pair and still simultaneouly balance the angular momentum,
the energy/momentum, and the flavor/isospin books. (Recall the neutrinos are
always stuck having a left-handed helicity and the anti-neutrinos are always
stuck with a right-handed helicity.) In this case I guess that the lightest
mix of particles that would be created from a super-intense static W/Z boson
field strength would be an electron/positron pair *and* a neutrino/
antineutrino pair, but I could easily be wrong here.

David Bowman
dbowman@gtc.georgetown.ky.us