Quantum Chromodynamics

quantum chromodynamics (QCD), in physics, the theory that describes the action of the strong force. QCD was constructed in analogy to quantum electrodynamics (QED), the quantum field theory of the electromagnetic force. In QED the electromagnetic interactions of charged particles are described through the emission and subsequent absorption of massless photons, best known as the “particles” of light; such interactions are not possible between uncharged, electrically neutral particles. The photon is described in QED as the “force-carrier” particle that mediates or transmits the electromagnetic force. By analogy with QED, quantum chromodynamics predicts the existence of force-carrier particles called gluons, which transmit the strong force between particles of matter that carry “colour,” a form of strong “charge.” The strong force is therefore limited in its effect to the behaviour of elementary subatomic particles called quarks and of composite particles built from quarks—such as the familiar protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei, as well as more-exotic unstable particles called mesons.

In 1973 the concept of colour as the source of a “strong field” was developed into the theory of QCD by European physicists Harald Fritzsch and Heinrich Leutwyler, together with American physicist Murray Gell-Mann. In particular, they employed the general field theory developed in the 1950s by Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills, in which the carrier particles of a force can themselves radiate further carrier particles. (This is different from QED, where the photons that carry the electromagnetic force do not radiate further photons.)

In QED there is only one type of electric charge, which can be positive or negative—in effect, this corresponds to charge and anticharge. To explain the behaviour of quarks in QCD, by contrast, there need to be three different types of colour charge, each of which can occur as colour or anticolour. The three types of charge are called red, green, and blue in analogy to the primary colours of light, although there is no connection whatsoever with colour in the usual sense.

Colour-neutral particles occur in one of two ways. In baryons—subatomic particles built from three quarks, as, for example, protons and neutrons—the three quarks are each of a different colour, and a mixture of the three colours produces a particle that is neutral. Mesons, on the other hand, are built from pairs of quarks and antiquarks, their antimatter counterparts, and in these the anticolour of the antiquark neutralizes the colour of the quark, much as positive and negative electric charges cancel each other to produce an electrically neutral object.

Quarks interact via the strong force by exchanging particles called gluons. In contrast to QED, where the photons exchanged are electrically neutral, the gluons of QCD also carry colour charges. To allow all the possible interactions between the three colours of quarks, there must be eight gluons, each of which generally carries a mixture of a colour and an anticolour of a different kind.

Because gluons carry colour, they can interact among themselves, and this makes the behaviour of the strong force subtly different from the electromagnetic force. QED describes a force that can extend across infinite reaches of space, although the force becomes weaker as the distance between two charges increases (obeying an inverse square law). In QCD, however, the interactions between gluons emitted by colour charges prevent those charges from being pulled apart. Instead, if sufficient energy is invested in the attempt to knock a quark out of a proton, for example, the result is the creation of a quark-antiquark pair—in other words, a meson. This aspect of QCD embodies the observed short-range nature of the strong force, which is limited to a distance of about 10⁻¹⁵ metre, shorter than the diameter of an atomic nucleus. It also explains the apparent confinement of quarks—that is, they have been observed only in bound composite states in baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons.