Hadrons are composite physical systems consisting of quarks bound together by gluons via the non-Abelian SU(3) color gauge interaction of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). They are color-neutral and fall into two main classes: baryons, composed of three valence quarks (qqq), and mesons, composed of a quark–antiquark pair (q\bar{q}). Their structure is governed by confinement, asymptotic freedom, and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, leading to rich spectra of resonances and internal parton distributions. Hadrons dominate strongly interacting matter, determine the properties of nuclear systems, and serve as primary probes of QCD in both perturbative and nonperturbative regimes.
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