Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

PANiC

11th September 2007 - 04:05 PM

Hello,

I have a question regardnig Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and how it applies to matter-antimatter creation and annihilation process.

When such happens in a vacuum, is there an "average" number of particle-antiparticle creation/destruction occurences per given time period? Is the average rate of this phenomenon determined? Or it just all depends on the observer?

NeoNo.1

11th September 2007 - 04:32 PM

If we are talking about mass-creation of particle-antiparticle pairs, we might turn to black holes. Just at the very boundary of a black hole, particle-antiparticle pairs are created in large amounts. The uncertainty principle runs the game and the aniparticle fall into the black hole whilst the normal particles radiate off into infinity without ever needing to come into contact with each other.
If we are talking about natural phenomena inherent in all of nature, then electrons can form out of a Dirac Sea and leave a hole (the antiparticle, the positron). They need not ever come into contact with each other again, but may very well come into contact with new partners. Does this answer your question?
Neo

PANiC

11th September 2007 - 05:34 PM

I thought the whole notion of UP was that nothing can be certain. So, for example, I understand that Hawking Radiation exists, but large black holes would almost take an eternity to evaporate. My question is, would it really matter to the rest of the universe if this "quantum boil" happened any faster...

If we were looking at a vacuum and decided to zoom into almost Planck's scale, there would be near infinite amount of +/- stuff happening. If we took the boundary of a black hole's gravity well, what would stop the nature from speeding up the black hole's evaporation process?

Case 1:

CODE

Black hole | Outside
|
|
-<--|-->+
|
|

or
Case 2:

CODE

Black hole | Outside
|
|
-<--|-->+
-<--|-->+
-<--|-->+
|
-<--|-->+
-<--|-->+
-<--|-->+
|

Wouldn't Case 2 make the black hole evaporate faster? At which point the rate at which this quantum boil happens becomes important?

Sorry, I am not very eloquent so I had to resort to diagrams.

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