Color confinement in the context of "Quark"

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⭐ Core Definition: Color confinement

In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), color confinement or infrared slavery, often simply called confinement, is the phenomenon that color-charged particles (such as quarks and gluons) cannot be isolated, and therefore cannot be directly observed in normal conditions below the Hagedorn temperature of approximately 2 terakelvin (corresponding to energies of approximately 130–140 MeV per particle). Quarks and gluons must clump together to form hadrons. The two main types of hadron are the mesons (one quark, one antiquark) and the baryons (often three quarks or antiquarks, though other exotic variants exist). In addition, colorless glueballs formed only of gluons are also consistent with confinement, though difficult to identify experimentally. Quarks and gluons cannot be separated from their parent hadron without producing new hadrons.

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👉 Color confinement in the context of Quark

A quark (/ˈkwɔːrk, ˈkwɑːrk/ ) is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks and electrons. Owing to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, which include baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons, or in quark–gluon plasmas. For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of hadrons.

Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. They are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction, and weak interaction), as well as the only known particles whose electric charges are not integer multiples of the elementary charge.

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Color confinement in the context of Strong interaction

In nuclear physics and particle physics, the strong interaction, also called the strong force or strong nuclear force, is one of the four known fundamental interactions. It confines quarks into protons, neutrons, and other hadron particles, and also binds neutrons and protons to create atomic nuclei, where it is called the nuclear force.

Most of the mass of a proton or neutron is the result of the strong interaction energy; the individual quarks provide only about 1% of the mass of a proton. At the range of 10 m (1 femtometer, slightly more than the radius of a nucleon), the strong force is approximately 100 times as strong as electromagnetism, 10 times as strong as the weak interaction, and 10 times as strong as gravitation.

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