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
Chirality (physics) to begin with, and therefore the pions are not massless, but have small masses: they are pseudo-Goldstone bosons. For more "light" quark species, flavors in general, the corresponding chiral symmetries are "U(N)×U(N)", decomposing into and exhibiting a very analogous chiral symmetry breaking pattern. Most usually, = 3 is taken, the "u, d", and "s" quarks taken to be light (the Eightfold way (physics)), so then approximately massless for the symmetry to be meaningful to a lowest order, while the other three quarks are sufficiently heavy to barely have a residual chiral symmetry be visible for practical purposes. In theoretical physics,