dark energy and the strong force

[decraig]

As I understand it, the continued acceleration due to dark energy results in a metric with ever larger components of tension.

 

At some point the tension should be in the order of magnitude of the strong force holding the quarks of both bosons and mesons together.

 

How would the physical situation appear?

[ajb]

We would need to have some numbers on the age of the Universe at this stage and see what kind of matter dominates at that epoch. At something like 10^40 years we have just leptons and photons as the only matter in the Universe, not including black holes. This is model dependent and relies on proton decay.

 

If the scenario you describe is only achieved when there are no nucleons left then we have nothing to worry about.

 

However, I have no idea on the time frame of this and how it effects our models.

[decraig]

ok. so you think protons decay.

[ajb]

GUT models suggest that proton do indeed decay, but this is now rather speculative and for sure they have a very long lifetime.

[Sensei]

Decay of proton would violate Baryon Number Conservation.

On the other hand, in old Universe, the all/most of protons would be converted to heavier elements in fusion process in stars.

[decraig]

GUT models suggest that proton do indeed decay, but this is now rather speculative and for sure they have a very long lifetime.

What does the picture look like If we assume protons do not decay?

 

If you recall, the model gives a visual picture. When enough energy is added to bound pair of quarks, the gluon breaks resulting in a quark-antiquark pair.

 

As far as I can see, sufficient gravitational tension would continually tear apart [math]q\overline{q}[/math] pairs resulting in more pairs.

[ajb]

What does the picture look like If we assume protons do not decay?

I do not know and I don't know if any references on cosmology talk about this.