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Color charge is a property of quarks and gluons that is related to the particles' strong interactions in the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Like electric charge, it determines how quarks and gluons interact through the strong force; however, rather than there being only positive and negative charges, there are three "charges", commonly called red, green, and blue.
A quark, which will have a single color value, can form a bound system with an antiquark carrying the corresponding anticolor. The result of two attracting quarks will be color neutrality: a quark with color charge ξ plus an antiquark with color charge −ξ will result in a color charge of 0 (or "white" color) and the formation of a meson.
The force between quarks is known as the colour force [6] (or color force [7]) or strong interaction, and is responsible for the nuclear force. Since the theory of electric charge is dubbed "electrodynamics", the Greek word χρῶμα (chrōma, "color") is applied to the theory of color charge, "chromodynamics".
Each is a scalar field, for some component of spacetime and gluon color charge. The Gell-Mann matrices λ a are eight 3 × 3 matrices which form matrix representations of the SU (3) group . They are also generators of the SU(3) group, in the context of quantum mechanics and field theory; a generator can be viewed as an operator corresponding to ...
Mesons are made of a valence quark–antiquark pair (thus have a baryon number of 0), while baryons are made of three quarks (thus have a baryon number of 1). This article discusses the quark model for the up, down, and strange flavors of quark (which form an approximate flavor SU(3) symmetry). There are generalizations to larger number of flavors.
The pattern of weak isospin T 3, weak hypercharge Y W, and color charge of all known elementary particles, rotated by the weak mixing angle to show electric charge Q, roughly along the vertical. The neutral Higgs field (gray square) breaks the electroweak symmetry and interacts with other particles to give them mass.
Color confinement is verified by the failure of free quark searches (searches of fractional charges). Quarks are normally produced in pairs (quark + antiquark) to compensate the quantum color and flavor numbers; however at Fermilab single production of top quarks has been shown. [b] [26] No glueball has been demonstrated.
Besides the quark confinement idea, there is a potential possibility that the color charge of quarks gets fully screened by the gluonic color surrounding the quark. Exact solutions of SU(3) classical Yang–Mills theory which provide full screening (by gluon fields) of the color charge of a quark have been found. [ 13 ]