Could the predicted new atomic physics kill the Platonic vision?

The Platonic vision connecting hadron physics, nuclear physics and atomic physics predicts a lot of new atomic physics and this could turn out to be fatal. I hasten to confess that the following speculations reflect my rudimentary knowledge of details of atomic physics. The new conceptual element are flux tubes, which can be regarded as springs with mass and elastic constant (string tension).

The first question concerns electric fields in the flux tube picture.

1. If there are only flux tubes present, the electric fluxes must run along them (a more conservative option is that fluxes flow to a large space-time sheet). Perhaps the most natural interpretation is that the localization of electric fluxes to flux tubes induces a constraint force due to the space-time geometry, something completely new. If so, one can argue that the dynamics for the flux tubes carrying also electric flux automatically describes the repulsive Coulomb force subject to geometrodynamic constraints.

   An important implication is that the Hamiltonian cycles of j-blocks must reconnect to the Hamiltonian cycles of other j-blocks and to the nucleus. The Hamiltonian cycles of the entire atom must fuse to a single large cycle, which can be closed for a neutral atom, and would correspond to closed monopole flux tube starting from the atomic nucleus. Each charge along the cycle contributes to the electric flux flowing in the monopole flux tube.

   It has been proposed (see this) that molecular bonds could be interpreted as electric flux tubes. This proposal is discussed from TGD point of view in \cite{allb/qcritdark3}. If the atoms of the molecule are ionized the Hamiltonian cycles of atoms must be reconnect by U-shaped tentacles and ionic bonds would correspond to flux tubes and presumably all chemical bonds.

Consider next the mass of the flux tube.

1. Flux tubes connecting neighboring charges could be p-adically scaled electropions with mass smaller than the mass 1 MeV of electropions and would contribute to the mass of the atom. In the case of nuclei scaled hadronic pions between nucleons having mass of order MeV are replaced by p-adically scaled elctropions. Note that electropions have mass of 1 MeV. In the case of atoms, their scaled variants should have a considerably smaller mass, which would naively correspond to the atomic p-adic length scale and mass scale of 1-10 keV. Note that 10 keV would be the scale of proposed nuclear excitation energies supported by nuclear physics X-ray anomalies. One can argue that the mass corresponds to the atomic p-adic length scale L(137) as a natural length scale for the flux tube gives and would be of order m\sim keV.
2. One the other hand, one could argue that the mass should be very small because, to my best knowledge, standard atomic physics works very well. However, the additive contribution of these masses does not affect the electronic bound state energies but only the total mass of the system. I do not know whether anyone has studied the possible dependence of the total mass of atom on the number of electrons? Does it contain an additive contribution increasing by one unit at each step along the row of the periodic table as an additional flux tube appears to the Hamilton cycle. These contributions could be also interpreted as contributions of the repulsive interactions of electrons to the energy.

As in the case of nuclei, the atomic flux tubes would act as springs, i.e. harmonic oscillators. This predicts a spectrum of excited states with scale determined by the elastic constant k or equivalent ground state oscillation frequency ω₀.

1. If ω₀ is large enough, the excitation energies would be greater than the ionization energy and there would be no detectable effects. The naive argument that ω₀ corresponds to the atomic length scale L(137) as a natural length scale for the flux tube gives ω₀\sim 1 keV. This energy scale would be for light atoms with Z≤ 9 (Oxygen) larger than the ionization energy E= Z²× 13.7 eV so that photons causing excitation would cause ionization.
2. An equally naive scaling from nuclear scale to atomic scale would suggest that the value of ω₀ is scaled from ℏω₀= 1 MeV by the ratio L(113/L(137)=2^-12 of nuclear and atomic length scales to about ω₀=.25 keV. This is not far from the above estimate.
3. How to deal with atoms with a small number of electrons, in particular Helium with 2 electrons? j=2 j-blocks are special in the sense that they do not allow sub-Hamiltonian cycle. Could the flux tube connecting the electrons be absent in this case so that only the repulsive electronic contribution would be present? Note also that the repulsive interaction energy between electrons would be smaller than the attractive interaction energy of electrons for atoms with Z=2. If this picture is correct, new atomic physics would emerge when j-block contains more than 2 electrons.

   One can also consider the possibility that the coupling to photons is weak enough, perhaps by the condition that the photon must transform first to dark photon. The behavior of multi-electron atoms in a radiation field whose photons have a low energy must have been studied.

One could also imagine that the flux tubes form a h_eff≥ h quantum coherent state, in which there are n=h_eff/h flux tubes forming the sub-tessellation of Platonic tessellation for a given j-block with vertices connected by flux tubs. Here n would be the number electrons in the j-block. The excitation energy E= ℏ_effω₀ is scaled by ℏ_eff/ℏ=n.

1. If all flux tubes associated with atom were excited at once as a phase transition, the required excitation energy would be rather large for large enough n and the excitations by photons might be possible without ionizing the atom.
2. The atoms at the left end of the row are the problem for this option and more generally, the atoms at the left end of each j-blocks. One expects that the flux tube length depends on the value of the principal quantum number N labelling the rows since the size of Platonic solid must increase with n like n². Can one assume that the mass of the spring does not depend on the row? If the elastic constant k does not depend on the row, one could consider a simultaneous collective excitation of all flux tubes so that the binding energy could increase enough.

See the article About Platonization of Nuclear String Model and of Model of Atoms or the chapter with the same title.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.