Could a black hole be used to produce free quarks

You could, momentarily, have a situation where the black hole has a net color, balanced by the color of a particle outside of the hole. This is not a violation of the no-hair theorem, because the situation would only be fleeting, and the no-hair theorem only states that any "hair" (properties other than mass, electric and magnetic charge, and linear and angular momentum) must exponentially decay on a short timescale. During these fleeting moments when the hole has a color, it would be able to exert a strong force on particles outside in exactly the same way that a charged hole can exert an electromagnetic force on particles outside. Or, for that matter, in exactly the same way that any hole can exert a gravitational force on particles outside. No real particle need exit the horizon to do so.

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Originally Posted by Bohandas

Could a black hole be used to seperate out individual quarks? The mechanism I'm imagining is shooting a meson (particle composed of one quark and one antiquark) at a significant portion of the speed of light on a trajectory so that it partially (less than half) intersects the event horizon on a tangent. Ideally sometimes this partial intersection will take the form of only one the two constituent particles actually being in the event horizon while the other would be outside the event horizon and going fast enough to get away.

Or would imparting the energy required to escape from a black hole from within a meson's width of the event horizon just result in that energy just turning the meson into a baryon or something and spoiling the experiment before it even got to the black hole?

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If the meson is on a geodesic path (ie there is no non-gravitational force moving it around) once it goes within the photosphere (1.5 times the event horizon radius) all parts of it will fall into the black hole unless it decays (in which case maybe one of the resulting particles will escape).

So even if this did work, the free quark would still be falling into the black hole.

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Originally Posted by Lvl 2 Expert

Alternatively, how weak are mesons?

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The answer is surprisingly simple: 10,000 newtons. There is no distance term. And that's per particle, not per mole or coulomb or anything.

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Originally Posted by Bohandas

It's not a matter of applying forces, its a matter of the quark inside the horizon being unable to communicate with the quark outside of it

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A quark constantly emits a flux of virtual gluons, and these take time to travel the distance to the other quark. If we remove one quark, there's still a potential energy and a color charge that can effect things (albeit for only a brief amount of time). As the meson is being ripped apart the space in the middle filled with gluon^tm soup will be high enough energy to produce two new quarks.

Dividing the space more and more shaprly just produces a higher energy density gluon soup.

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Originally Posted by hamishspence

That's not how it works. It's possible to cross the event horizon while travelling at a relatively low speed, especially if the black hole is sufficiently big.

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I'm pretty confident you two are using different definitions of speed.

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Originally Posted by Chronos

You could, momentarily, have a situation where the black hole has a net color, balanced by the color of a particle outside of the hole. This is not a violation of the no-hair theorem, because t........

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The no-hair theorem isn't a quantum theorem. The strong and weak forces don't actually exist as far as General relativity in concerned, so the no-hair theorem doesn't really say a black hole can't have a color charge as much as it says "what's a color charge?"

The most straightforward extension is to say that a black hole's only properties are it's mass, angular momentum, electric charge, weak isospin, and three color charges. And that just like the electric charge, these other charges will persist until something falls into the black hole to balance them.

As a followup question, if quark confinement is indeed 100% absolute, does that mean that a big rip scenario would result effectively in a new big bang?

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Originally Posted by Bohandas

As a followup question, if quark confinement is indeed 100% absolute, does that mean that a big rip scenario would result effectively in a new big bang?

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Possibly. Although there's a lot of unknowns and the strong force may work differently with so much dark energy.

A big rip strong enough to tear apart quarks might trigger the creation of new particles, and enough of them to create enough normal energy to counteract the abundance of dark energy similar to how inflation stopped in the tiniest fraction of a second during the big bang.

However, the only thing going for this idea is that it doesn't contradict what we already know about such extreme situations, and that's only because we currently know very little. Cosmologists best guess now is that gravity will win out over dark energy on the scale of galaxy clusters, at least until the far future well after all the black holes have radiated away all their mass. So it's an interesting thought, but nobody knows enough to say how plausible it might be.