Gluons are force-mediating particles that hold atomic nuclei together through the strong nuclear force, the strongest of the four forces of nature. Gluons have their own “color” and interact with themselves, making quantum chromodynamics more complicated than quantum electrodynamics. Gluons were discovered in 1979 and are responsible for an unusual phenomenon called “confinement.”
Gluons are force-mediating particles that exist in every atomic nucleus, holding it together. They mediate the strong nuclear force, which is the strongest of the four forces of nature, 137 times stronger than electromagnetism and about 1.6 x 1039 times stronger than gravity, the weakest force. Its limitation is that it operates only over extremely small distances, the scale of the atomic nucleus. At distances greater than a femtometer (width of a medium-sized atomic nucleus) the strong force begins to fade.
The strong force holds all known matter in the universe together with the exception of dark matter, about which we know virtually nothing. Thus the atomic nucleus consists of a combination of nucleons (protons and neutrons) and gluons.
Like a photon (light), a gluon has no mass. It just represents a bundle of strength. Unlike photons, however, gluons have their own “color” – the name of the charge in the strong force – which means they interact with themselves, making quantum chromodynamics (strong force) mathematically more complicated than quantum electrodynamics (electromagnetism). ). Physicists suspect that a “glueball,” an aggregation of just gluons with no nucleons, might be possible, but it hasn’t yet been observed.
The gluon was first discovered in 1979 during the TASSO experiment at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany. In typical collisions between electrons and positrons (antielectrons), especially accelerators, a quark and an antiquark are created, which emit two distinct jets of particles that can be observed in the cloud chamber. But at a high enough energy, a third jet appears, representing gluons escaping from the nucleus. This provided experimental evidence for the existence of gluons, the existence of which had been suspected for a while.
There are eight different types of gluons in total and three different types of “color” (strong force charge). Gluons are responsible for an unusual phenomenon called “confinement.” You can never separate two color-charged particles from each other. Unlike electromagnetism, where the charge between two objects decreases as they move away from each other, the strong force remains constant and extremely powerful. Only in the hottest and densest environments (possibly in the centers of the most massive neutron stars and in particle accelerators) do gluons and nucleons from different atomic nuclei intertwine and become what is called quark plasma, a floating gluon soup. and nucleons.
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