# Acceleration by Strong Interactions

## TL;DR

This paper explores the possibility of using repulsive strong interactions for particle acceleration, proposing a thought experiment involving deep inelastic scattering to directly observe these forces.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental concept to directly detect repulsive strong interactions between quarks, which has not been experimentally demonstrated before.

## Key findings

- Estimated the number of electrons needed to observe repulsive effects
- Proposed a specific experimental setup involving deep inelastic scattering
- Discussed the theoretical basis for repulsive strong forces

## Abstract

Beyond the attractive strong potential needed for hadronic bound states, strong interactions are predicted to provide repulsive forces depending on the color charges involved. The repulsive interactions could in principle serve for particle acceleration with highest gradients in the order of GeV/fm. Indirect evidence for repulsive interactions have been reported in the context of heavy meson production at colliders. In this contribution, we sketch a thought experiment to directly investigate repulsive strong interactions. For this we prepare two quarks using two simultaneous deep inelastic scattering processes off an iron target. We discuss the principle setup of the experiment and estimate the number of electrons on target required to observe a repulsive effect between the quarks.