Kwork - Properties - Strong Interaction and Color Charge

Strong Interaction and Color Charge

According to QCD, quarks possess a property called color charge. There are three types of color charge, arbitrarily labeled blue, green, and red. Each of them is complemented by an anticolor—antiblue, antigreen, and antired. Every quark carries a color, while every antiquark carries an anticolor.

The system of attraction and repulsion between quarks charged with different combinations of the three colors is called strong interaction, which is mediated by force carrying particles known as gluons; this is discussed at length below. The theory that describes strong interactions is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). A quark charged with one color value can form a bound system with an antiquark carrying the corresponding anticolor; three (anti)quarks, one of each (anti)color, will similarly be bound together. The result of two attracting quarks will be color neutrality: a quark with color charge ξ plus an antiquark with color charge −ξ will result in a color charge of 0 (or "white" color) and the formation of a meson. Analogous to the additive color model in basic optics, the combination of three quarks or three antiquarks, each with different color charges, will result in the same "white" color charge and the formation of a baryon or antibaryon.

In modern particle physics, gauge symmetries—a kind of symmetry group—relate interactions between particles (see gauge theories). Color SU(3) (commonly abbreviated to SU(3)_c) is the gauge symmetry that relates the color charge in quarks and is the defining symmetry for quantum chromodynamics. Just as the laws of physics are independent of which directions in space are designated x, y, and z, and remain unchanged if the coordinate axes are rotated to a new orientation, the physics of quantum chromodynamics is independent of which directions in three-dimensional color space are identified as blue, red, and green. SU(3)_c color transformations correspond to "rotations" in color space (which, mathematically speaking, is a complex space). Every quark flavor f, each with subtypes f_B, f_G, f_R corresponding to the quark colors, forms a triplet: a three-component quantum field which transforms under the fundamental representation of SU(3)_c. The requirement that SU(3)_c should be local—that is, that its transformations be allowed to vary with space and time—determines the properties of the strong interaction, in particular the existence of eight gluon types to act as its force carriers.