Calculation shows why heavy quarks get caught up in the flow

Using some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, a group of theorists has produced a major advance in the field of nuclear physics—a calculation of the "heavy quark diffusion coefficient." This number describes how ...

Physicists track sequential 'melting' of upsilons

Scientists using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to study some of the hottest matter ever created in a laboratory have published their first data showing how three distinct variations of particles called upsilons ...

Quarks and gluons: The JADE experiment at DESY

A new paper in The European Physical Journal H (EPJ H) describes the JADE experiment at DESY in Hamburg, in which high-energy electron-positron collisions led to the discovery of the particle that holds quarks together to ...

Data reveal a surprising preference in particle spin alignment

Given the choice of three different "spin" orientations, certain particles emerging from collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National ...

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Gluon

Gluons (pronounced /ˈɡluːɒnz/; from English glue) are elementary particles which act as the exchange particles (or gauge bosons) for the color force between quarks, analogous to the exchange of photons in the electromagnetic force between two charged particles.

Since quarks make up the baryons, and the strong interaction takes place between baryons, one could say that the color force is the source of the strong interaction, or that the strong interaction is like a residual color force which extends beyond the baryons, for example when protons and neutrons are bound together in a nucleus.

In technical terms, they are vector gauge bosons that mediate strong interactions of quarks in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Unlike the electrically neutral photon of quantum electrodynamics (QED), gluons themselves carry color charge and therefore participate in the strong interaction in addition to mediating it, making QCD significantly harder to analyze than QED.

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