8/21/2016 Are virtual particles really constantly popping in and out of existence?

Or are they merely a mathematical bookkeeping device for quantum mechanics? - Sci…

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Are virtual particles really constantly popping in and

out of existence? Or are they merely a mathematical
bookkeeping device for quantum mechanics?

October 9, 2006

Gordon Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical

Physics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, provides this
answer.
Virtual particles are indeed real particles. Quantum theory predicts that every
particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible
ways. These predictions are very well understood and tested.

Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of

conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles
(the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as
if they had never been there. If that were all that occurred we would still be
confident that it was a real effect because it is an intrinsic part of quantum
mechanics, which is extremely well tested, and is a complete and tightly woven
theory--if any part of it were wrong the whole structure would collapse.

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8/21/2016 Are virtual particles really constantly popping in and out of existence? Or are they merely a mathematical bookkeeping device for quantum mechanics? - Sci…

But while the virtual particles are briefly part of our world they can interact
with other particles, and that leads to a number of tests of the quantum-
mechanical predictions about virtual particles. The first test was understood in
the late 1940s. In a hydrogen atom an electron and a proton are bound together
by photons (the quanta of the electromagnetic field). Every photon will spend
some time as a virtual electron plus its antiparticle, the virtual positron, since
this is allowed by quantum mechanics as described above. The hydrogen atom
has two energy levels that coincidentally seem to have the same energy. But
when the atom is in one of those levels it interacts differently with the virtual
electron and positron than when it is in the other, so their energies are shifted a
tiny bit because of those interactions. That shift was measured by Willis Lamb
and the Lamb shift was born, for which a Nobel Prize was eventually awarded.

Quarks are particles much like electrons, but different in that they also interact
via the strong force. Two of the lighter quarks, the so-called "up" and "down"
quarks, bind together to make up protons and neutrons. The "top" quark is the
heaviest of the six types of quarks. In the early 1990s it had been predicted to
exist but had not been directly seen in any experiment. At the LEP collider at
the European particle physics laboratory CERN, millions of Z bosons--the
particles that mediate neutral weak interactions--were produced and their
mass was very accurately measured. The Standard Model of particle physics
predicts the mass of the Z boson, but the measured value differed a little. This
small difference could be explained in terms of the time the Z spent as a virtual
top quark if such a top quark had a certain mass. When the top quark mass was
directly measured a few years later at the Tevatron collider at Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, the value agreed with
SHthat
A REobtained
L Afrom
TEST

the virtual particle analysis, providing a dramatic test of our understanding of

virtual particles.

Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not
have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal
plates in empty space are modified by the presence of virtual particles.

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8/21/2016 Are virtual particles really constantly popping in and out of existence? Or are they merely a mathematical bookkeeping device for quantum mechanics? - Sci…

Thus virtual particles are indeed real and have observable effects that
physicists have devised ways of measuring. Their properties and consequences
are well established and well understood consequences of quantum mechanics.

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