Watching this episode of PBS Space Time, they run an animation of how pi mesons are exchanged by nucleons as the residual strong interaction to overcome proton electromagnetic repulsion.
https://youtu.be/E8hyodMhbRw?si=2v2DbdsVOkDHETqv&t=674
They show one quark being pulled away in its nucleon to a tubule extruding from the nucleon towards another quark in the other nucleon, attracted as if they'd want to exchange gluons, which creates the pi meson that gets exchanged with another nucleon, with all color conserved.
The preponderant claim is that the pi meson is a virtual particle created in accordance with the uncertainty principle.
I'd read that attempts to liberate a quark from confinement cause the strong interaction to get stronger with distance which can generate so much energy that hadrons fountain out at the extremes. That's almost as mindblowing as the uncertainty principle.
If this animation is correct and one quark gets tugged away from the other two by another quark in a different nucleon, would that increased distance increase the gluon flux to create sufficient energy directly from the strong interaction needed to produce a meson, a real particle, not pulled from the vacuum, that is short lived because they're properly disposed of, not because they're paying back uncertainty?
Or is pi meson exchange between nucleons (and everything else) all about uncertainty? Does an abundance of energy in a system such as tugging on a quark or an unstable nucleus that would be more stable after decaying to a lower energy state provide enough energy to the vacuum to create virtual mesons or W/Z bosons per uncertainty just to get the job done?
