What gives charge to a particle?

[Farsight]

I would say: topology.
There are many similarities between mass and charge (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitoelectromagnetism ), but beside changed sign, there is one essential difference: charge is quantized, mass not.
Gauss law says that inside a closed surface (not cutting through a charge), there is integer number of elementary charges inside - reducing the volume we get single elementary charge volumes and finally we can tighten around a single one to nearly zero volume.
This way Gauss law alone gives this tiny volume elementary charge - the real question is to understand why it has to be quantized.

So maybe we could improve-reformulate electromagnetism to have this quantization deeply written to understand the source of electric charge?
Yes, it can be easily done using topology: use field of unit vectors and define charge as topological charge ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conley_index_theory ).
Now elementary charge is hedgehog configuration (v(x)=x/|x|) - its curvature drops with distance, defining electric field directly from this curvature, prof. Faber got standard electromagnetic interaction between such charges: http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/361/1/012022/

Good stuff Jarek. A particle doesn't so much "have" charge, but instead is better described as "a topological construct where curvature is closed".

[RJBeery]

Good stuff Jarek. A particle doesn't so much "have" charge, but instead is better described as "a topological construct where curvature is closed".

A variant of this has been floating around in my head for years; all matter being constructs of fields with closed curvature. The trick is to make the appropriate numbers drop out of the model without being ad-hoc about it...

[Jarek Duda]

We need to properly choose the field to make its "closed curvature" to do what we need. Using that quantum phase is topologically a circle (S^1) makes magnetic flux quantized in superconductors (Abrikosov vortices) - make them localized field constructs (topological solitons). Choosing sphere (S^2) as vacuum dynamics, makes charges quantizied - they became topological solitons, which as Faber showed, with natural choice of Lagrangian behaves accordingly to standard electrodynamics.
But it's a bit too simple - we know that the simplest charge (electron) has also magnetic dipole moment, that there three types of leptons, that they have internal de Broglie's clock for quantum behaviors like interference, tunneling, orbit quantization (observed for Abrikosov vortices and for classical objects withit such wave-particle duality).
S^2 is not enough, so to this single unit vector in each point, let us complement it with two orthogonal - use SO(3) field instead of S^2. It is one additional degree of freedom of rotations around the original unit vector (the quantum phase) - now hedgehog configuration can be made by one of three axes, topology (hairy ball theorem) says that the remaining two axes cannot be continuously aligned on a sphere around - leptons has to have magnetic dipole moment ... and further we get what looks as the whole particle menagerie with behavior as expected (extended description) ... coincidence?

[Farsight]

No concidence. Yes, the sphere is a bit too simple, the magnetic dipole moment tells you it isn't some perfect balanced sphere. Besides, the electron and positron have opposite chirality. Draw othogonal arrows on a ping-pong ball and you can't achieve two different chiralities. You need a torus at least as per Williamson / van der Mark. You can make it a fat torus a bit like an apple and then make it even fatter so that it's as close as you like to a sphere, the electron having a spherical electric field, but it doesn't have spherical topology. Note that the muon and the tau aren't stable, the curve isn't locked into permanent closure. Thinking of Topological Quantum Field Theory it's as if they're slip knots rather than true knots, see On Vortex Particles by David Saint John.

RJ: Sounds good to me. I can't explain why this general theme hasn't received more attention.

[hansda]

But that is a grossly underinformed position. Disturbances in fields take time to propagate because space means not everything happens in the same place and time means not everything happens simultaneously. However, coupling between fields is local, which means it happens at the same time and place. When radio waves exhaust themselves when they transfer their momentum to electrons in an antenna, there is no time involved since if there was a time delay then momentum and energy would vanish from the universe only to appear some time later from nothing.

I think hysteresis is a phenomena , where this time-delay factor can be observed.

[rpenner]

Then you continue to be grossly underinformed. You were talking on the previous page about fundamental interactions, not general "phenomena."

Hysteresis is not about fundamental fields but the ability of certain collections of matter having memory. For example, ferromagnetic iron can have domains of aligned magnetic moments, external fields can bias the alignment, and the iron can retain a memory of what happened to it. That's the basis of all magnetic recording media from wire recorders to disk drives.

Likewise, a house has a state in its total heat load, so an air conditioning unit that can only move a certain amount of heat per second will need time to adjust the heat of the house. Likewise even if it suddenly becomes very hot outside it takes time for the temperature inside the house to rise to its maximum.

So hysteresis is not about the time-delay of fundamental fields, but about collections of matter having a state that reflects aspects of their past history. That you failed to remember the context of my previous answers is actually a failure of memory -- a failure of hysteresis.

[Trooper]

That you failed to remember the context of my previous answers is actually a failure of memory -- a failure of hysteresis.

Or reversed. Hit in the head with a hammer. Wham bam, amnesia….born again virgin.

Bada bing, bada boom

[AlphaNumeric]

Thinking of Topological Quantum Field Theory it's as if they're slip knots rather than true knots, see On Vortex Particles by David Saint John.

Something tells me the extent of your 'understanding' of topological quantum field theory is pretty much "There's some analogy to do with knots which is relevant here". Tell me, have you were done topological quantum field theory or is "Draw arrows on ping pong balls" as advanced as you get? Can you ever get past just spewing analogies?

[AlphaNumeric]

It was once believed that the Yang Mills equations predicted massless particles with a charge... experimentally this was wrong. It seems that there is a synchronicity between mass and charge. You want to know what charge is, you need to solve the problem of how a thing has a mass, in other words.

It isn't really a matter of belief since you can immediately read off the masses and charges of all particles in a quantum field theory from their equations of motion or Lagrangian. Can you provide a citation....... Reiku?

[OnlyMe]

Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I immediately think of things like... a charge to mass ratio... just a quick example. But yeah, I hold to what I say - there is something (a) synchronicity between the appearance of mass - and when a charge is present. This is why, when mass is not present, we have sterile energy systems, like a photon.

How does the neutrino fit into this? A particle with no charge and yet mass.

I see an approach where one claims that because the neutrino interacts through the weak or electroweak force, there is some mass related charge. The problem with this approach is that the photon is, by your own assessment, both massless and without charge, and yet it interacts with particles and atoms, as a function of their electromagnetic characteristics.

It seems to me that it is not so much the charge of a particle or photon, that is responsible for mass but how a particle interacts with a field external to itself, which would seem to emerge from, again some externally defined charge.

In the end, from where I sit, this works more to suggest some relationship between inertia and charge. Though from there the interdependence between the concepts of mass and inertia, only functions to further confuse the distinction.

The point is that while there is some work that suggests that inertia, and thus indirectly mass, may involve the interaction of charge, it is not limited to the charge of the particle in question.

[rpenner]

Monopoles are hypothetical objects with a magnetic charge.
A magnetic dipole moment (like the one exhibited by the neutron and all electrically charged particles with intrinsic angular momentum) is distinct from any type of magnetic charge.

So the paper http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0601113 appears to be motivated by a particular model as well as the observation that neutrinos have mass. The moment calculated is extremely slight.

[hansda]

Good stuff Jarek. A particle doesn't so much "have" charge, but instead is better described as "a topological construct where curvature is closed".

What do you mean by "curvature is closed"?

[Jarek Duda]

He probably referred to Gauss-Bonnet theorem - integrating Gaussian curvature over compact 2D manifold (e.g. orthogonal to chosen axis in our case) we get 2pi times Euler characteristic of this surface. It is for charge quantization, its 2D analogue for spin is like integrating ln(f)'=f'/f over a contour in complex analysis.

[hansda]

I think perhaps, charge and mass are created at the very same time from a chargeless and massless state.

[hansda]

Charge and mass could have a chronological order in the universe.

If charge and mass have a chronological order of formation from a chargeless and massless state, then there can be only two possibilities. 1) Either charge is created first or 2) Mass is created first.

In the first case: If charge is created first, then it can be said that mass is created from charge later on.

In the second case: If mass is created first, then it can be said that charge is created from mass later on.

I dont think, there can be a possibility for the above two cases. So, perhaps charge and mass are created at the same time from a chargeless and massless state.

It depends on whether charge and mass are really unified objects. There is a lot of evidence to suggest this could be the case.

Can you provide some reference or examples as evidence for your above statement?

[hansda]

Recently I have been investigation what mass is. Mass is also a charge.



The quantity is called a gravitational charge and was defined in quite a number of papers by Professor Lloyd Motz. http://www.gravityresearchfoundation.../1971/motz.pdf I actually surmised the above equation from the quantization condition since the Heaviside relationship is . Alphanumeric, the ... I'll be kind, fool, believed I was just shuffling coefficients about without justification in my opening post on this subject, but I had strong reasons to believe the equation was right. It wasn't until about a week later I came across a paper which derived the same equation, so I was quite confident about the predictions of the elementary equations. So to summarize, Mass comes about in a character similar to an elementary charge. The two maybe inseparable.

This charge 'e' is positive or negative? or, A pair of positive and negative charges are created from a neutral mass?

[hansda]

I think from an equation, e = f(m) [ where e is electrical charge and m is mass ] ; it is very difficult to make any chronological order between charge and mass from a chargeless and massless state. Because the equation also can be written other way as m = f1(e) [ where f and f1 denote some functions ].


These equations at the most only can explain interchangeability from charge and mass but not their chronological order.

[Gravage]

I believe that the current answer to that question is no. There was nothing prior to the moment of the BB. No space, no time, no matter, no energy, no particles, no forces, no distance, no laws of nature, nothing.

It has to be definitely something all the energy that created the big bang had to come from something/somewhere.