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
Gauge theory Lagrangian. In the quantized version of the obtained classical field theory, the quanta of the gauge field "A"("x") are called gauge bosons. The interpretation of the interaction Lagrangian in quantum field theory is of scalar bosons interacting by the exchange of these gauge bosons. The picture of a classical gauge theory developed in the previous section is almost complete, except for the fact that to define the covariant derivatives "D", one needs to know the value of the gauge field formula_29 at all space-time points. Instead of manually specifying the values of this field, it can be given as the