Color confinement

Color confinement, often simply called confinement, is the phenomenon that color charged particles (such as quarks) cannot be isolated singularly, and therefore cannot be directly observed. Quarks, by default, clump together to form groups, or hadrons. The two types of hadrons are the mesons (one quark, one antiquark) and the baryons (three quarks).

The constituent quarks in a group cannot be separated from their parent hadron, and this is why quarks currently cannot be studied or observed in any more direct way than at a hadron level.

The reasons for quark confinement are somewhat complicated; no analytic proof exists that quantum chromodynamics should be confining. The current theory is that confinement is due to the force-carrying gluons having color charge. As any two electrically charged particles separate, the electric fields between them diminish quickly, allowing (for example) electrons to become unbound from atomic nuclei. However, as a quark-antiquark pair separates, the gluon field forms a narrow tube (or string) of color field between them. This is quite different from the behavior of the electric field of a pair of positive and negative electric charges, which extends into the whole surrounding space and diminishes at large distances. Because of this behavior of the gluon field, a strong force between the quark pair acts constantly—regardless of their distance—with a force of around 10,000 newtons.

When two quarks become separated, as happens in particle accelerator collisions, at some point it is more energetically favorable for a new quark–antiquark pair to spontaneously appear, than to allow the tube to extend further. As a result of this, when quarks are produced in particle accelerators, instead of seeing the individual quarks in detectors, scientists see "jets" of many color-neutral particles (mesons and baryons), clustered together. This process is called hadronization, fragmentation, or string breaking, and is one of the least understood processes in particle physics.

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