Yukawa potential

Imagine you are playing with a ball and you throw it to your friend. When the ball is in the air, it slows down because of the air resistance around it. This is just like the Yukawa potential.

The Yukawa potential is a special kind of force that happens between two objects when they are very close together. It is named after a scientist named Hideki Yukawa who studied how particles interact with each other.

The force of the Yukawa potential gets weaker as the objects get further away from each other. Just like how the ball slows down less the further it gets from you.

But what makes the Yukawa potential different from other forces is that it decreases much faster the further away the objects get from each other. It's like if you threw the ball to your friend, but instead of slowly stopping, it suddenly lost all its speed when it was still pretty close to your friend.

This force is important in physics because it helps us understand how particles stick together and also how they repel each other. Scientists use the Yukawa potential to study the behavior of atoms, molecules, and even particles inside the nucleus of an atom.