Gluon Gluon A gluon () is an elementary particle that acts as the exchange particle (or gauge boson) for the strong force between quarks. It is analogous to the exchange of photons in the electromagnetic force between two charged particles. In layman's terms, they "glue" quarks together, forming hadrons such as protons and neutrons. In technical terms, gluons are vector gauge bosons that mediate strong interactions of quarks in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Gluons themselves carry the color charge of the strong interaction. This is unlike the photon, which mediates the electromagnetic interaction but lacks an electric charge. Gluons therefore participate in
X and Y bosons X and Y bosons In particle physics, the X and Y bosons (sometimes collectively called "X bosons") are hypothetical elementary particles analogous to the W and Z bosons, but corresponding to a new type of force predicted by the Georgi–Glashow model, a grand unified theory. The X and Y bosons couple quarks to leptons, allowing violation of the conservation of baryon number, and thus permitting proton decay. An X boson would have the following decay modes: where the two decay products in each process have opposite chirality, is an up quark, is a down antiquark and is a positron. A