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An answer to a related question described protons and neutrons as made up of a "sea of quarks, anti-quarks, gluons, ...." with a net makeup to provide either a unit charge or no net charge. If so, the question arises as to whether it is possible to "boil" a quark or other particle out of a neutron. If so, I would like to know what is the theoretical energy to remove a quark or other particle from a neutron. Such a value would be useful in a model on which I am working.

And, is it reasonable to consider a proton or neutron as a "container", perhaps one from which escape is not possible?

Incredible II
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Quarks and gluons are subject to “color confinement”: the strong interaction is so strong that only color-singlet objects are independently observable systems. At low energies, the relevant degrees of freedom are the baryons (with three valence quarks) and the mesons (whose valence structure is a quark-antiquark pair). The strong-interaction decays of excited baryons are generally via meson emission.

At very high energy, the vacuum undergoes a phase transition to a “quark-gluon plasma,” in which the baryon-meson degrees of freedom disappear and the quark-gluon degrees of freedom are better. But you can’t extract a single quark from a QGP; it is a collective phenomenon, more like a liquid. A QGP cools by condensing into baryons, antibaryons, and mesons.

Whenever I give this little spiel, a heavy-quark person appears to remind me that the bottom and top quarks live so briefly that they don’t really hadronize. So there is a sense in which you can talk about “a bottom quark,” where if you had the same conversation about charm you would eventually need to switch to “a charmed meson.”

rob
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