Color confinement. This is a consequence of the constant force between two color charges as they are separated: In order to increase the separation between two quarks within a hadron, ever-increasing amounts of energy are required. Eventually, this energy becomes so great as to spontaneously produce a quark–antiquark pair, turning the initial hadron into a pair of hadrons instead of producing an isolated color charge. Although analytically unproven, color confinement is well established from lattice QCD calculations and decades of experiments.[1]
Asymptotic freedom, a steady reduction in the strength of interactions between quarks and gluons as the energy scale of those interactions increases (and the corresponding length scale decreases). The asymptotic freedom of QCD was discovered in 1973 by David Gross and Frank Wilczek,[2] and independently by David Politzer in the same year.[3] For this work, all three shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.[4]
QCD exhibits two main properties:
Color confinement. This is a consequence of the constant force between two color charges as they are separated: In order to increase the separation between two quarks within a hadron, ever-increasing amounts of energy are required. Eventually, this energy becomes so great as to spontaneously produce a quark–antiquark pair, turning the initial hadron into a pair of hadrons instead of producing an isolated color charge. Although analytically unproven, color confinement is well established from lattice QCD calculations and decades of experiments.[1]
Asymptotic freedom, a steady reduction in the strength of interactions between quarks and gluons as the energy scale of those interactions increases (and the corresponding length scale decreases). The asymptotic freedom of QCD was discovered in 1973 by David Gross and Frank Wilczek,[2] and independently by David Politzer in the same year.[3] For this work, all three shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.[4]