Colour charge in the context of "Grand unification epoch"

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⭐ Core Definition: Colour charge

Color charge is a property of quarks and gluons that is related to the particles' strong interactions in the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Like electric charge, it determines how quarks and gluons interact through the strong force; however, rather than there being only positive and negative charges, there are three "charges", commonly called red, green, and blue. Additionally, there are three "anti-colors", commonly called anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue. Unlike electric charge, color charge is never observed in nature: in all cases, red, green, and blue (or anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue) or any color and its anti-color combine to form a "color-neutral" system. For example, the three quarks making up any baryon universally have three different color charges, and the two quarks making up any meson universally have opposite color charge.

The "color charge" of quarks and gluons is completely unrelated to the everyday meaning of color, which refers to the frequency of photons, the particles that mediate a different fundamental force, electromagnetism. The term color and the labels red, green, and blue became popular simply because of the loose but convenient analogy to the primary colors.

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👉 Colour charge in the context of Grand unification epoch

In physical cosmology, the grand unification epoch is a poorly understood period in the evolution of the early universe following the Planck epoch and preceding inflation. This places it between about 10 seconds after the Big Bang and 10 seconds, when the temperature of the universe was comparable to the characteristic temperatures of grand unified theories. However, these theories have not been successful producing quantitative agreement with the results of modern astrophysical observations.

If the grand unification energy is taken to be 10 GeV, this corresponds to temperatures higher than 10 K. During this period, three of the four fundamental interactions—electromagnetism, the strong interaction, and the weak interaction—were unified as the electronuclear force. Gravity had separated from the electronuclear force at the end of the Planck era. During the grand unification epoch, physical characteristics such as mass, charge, flavour and colour charge were meaningless.

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Colour charge in the context of Quark–gluon plasma

Quark–gluon plasma (QGP or quark soup) is an interacting localized assembly of quarks and gluons at thermal (local kinetic) and (close to) chemical (abundance) equilibrium. The word plasma signals that free color charges are allowed. In a 1987 summary, Léon Van Hove pointed out the equivalence of the three terms: quark gluon plasma, quark matter and a new state of matter. Since the temperature is above the Hagedorn temperature—and thus above the scale of light u,d-quark mass—the pressure exhibits the relativistic Stefan–Boltzmann format governed by temperature to the fourth power () and many practically massless quark and gluon constituents. It can be said that QGP emerges to be the new phase of strongly interacting matter which manifests its physical properties in terms of nearly free dynamics of practically massless gluons and quarks. Both quarks and gluons must be present in conditions near chemical (yield) equilibrium with their color charge open for a new state of matter to be referred to as QGP.

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LINKED FROM (PARENTS)
← Quark–gluon plasma ← Grand unification epoch
LINKS TO (CHILDREN)
Quark → Gluon → Strong interaction → Quantum chromodynamics → Electric charge → Baryon → Meson → Color → Photon → Electromagnetism → Primary color →