Force force. Here the strong force acts indirectly, transmitted as gluons, which form part of the virtual pi and rho mesons, which classically transmit the nuclear force (see this topic for more). The failure of many searches for free quarks has shown that the elementary particles affected are not directly observable. This phenomenon is called color confinement. The weak force is due to the exchange of the heavy W and Z bosons. Its most familiar effect is beta decay (of neutrons in atomic nuclei) and the associated radioactivity. The word "weak" derives from the fact that the field strength is some
Technicolor (physics) and leptons, giving them their observed masses. (In general, electroweak-eigenstate fermions are not mass eigenstates, so this process also induces the mixing matrices observed in charged-current weak interactions.) In technicolor, something else must generate the quark and lepton masses. The only natural possibility, one avoiding the introduction of elementary scalars, is to enlarge "G" to allow technifermions to couple to quarks and leptons. This coupling is induced by gauge bosons of the enlarged group. The picture, then, is that there is a large "extended technicolor" (ETC) gauge group "G" ⊃ "G" in which technifermions, quarks, and leptons live in the