First detection of exotic 'X' particles in quark-gluon plasma

In the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a roiling, trillion-degree plasma of quarks and gluons—elementary particles that briefly glommed together in countless combinations before cooling ...

New and surprising duality found in theoretical particle physics

A new and surprising duality has been discovered in theoretical particle physics. The duality exists between two types of scattering processes that can occur in the proton collisions made in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN ...

'Perfect liquid' quark-gluon plasma is the most vortical fluid

Particle collisions recreating the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) that filled the early universe reveal that droplets of this primordial soup swirl far faster than any other fluid. The new analysis of data from the Relativistic ...

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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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