Asymptotic freedom

In physics, asymptotic freedom is the property of some gauge theories in which the interaction between the particles, such as quarks, becomes arbitrarily weak at ever shorter distances, i.e. length scales that asymptotically converge to zero (or, equivalently, energy scales that become arbitrarily large).

Screening and antiscreening

The variation in a physical coupling constant under changes of scale can be understood qualitatively as coming from the action of the field on virtual particles carrying the relevant charge. The Landau pole behavior of QED is a consequence of screening by virtual charged particle-antiparticle pairs, such as electron-positron pairs, in the vacuum. In the vicinity of a charge, the vacuum becomes polarized: virtual particles of opposing charge are attracted to the charge, and virtual particles of like charge are repelled. The net effect is to partially cancel out the field at any finite distance. Getting closer and closer to the central charge, one sees less and less of the effect of the vacuum, and the effective charge increases.

Related Topics:
Virtual particle - Antiparticle - Electron - Positron

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In QCD, the same thing happens with virtual quark-antiquark pairs; they tend to screen the color charge. However, QCD has an additional wrinkle: its force-carrying particles, the gluons, themselves carry color charge, and in a different manner. Roughly speaking, each gluon carries both a color charge and an anti-color charge. The net effect of polarization of virtual gluons in the vacuum is not to screen the field, but to augment it and affect its color. This is sometimes called antiscreening. Getting closer to a quark diminishes the antiscreening effect of the surrounding virtual gluons, so the contribution of this effect would be to weaken the effective charge with decreasing distance.

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Since the virtual quarks and the virtual gluons contribute opposite effects, which effect wins out depends on the number of different kinds, or flavors, of quark. For standard QCD with three colors, as long as there are no more than 16 flavors of quark (not counting the antiquarks separately), antiscreening prevails and the theory is asymptotically free. In fact, there are only 6 known quark flavors.

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