Elementary particle interact via photon exchange. However, gluons are themselves color-charged, resulting in an amplification of the strong force as color-charged particles are separated. Unlike the electromagnetic force, which diminishes as charged particles separate, color-charged particles feel increasing force. However, color-charged particles may combine to form color neutral composite particles called hadrons. A quark may pair up with an antiquark: the quark has a color and the antiquark has the corresponding anticolor. The color and anticolor cancel out, forming a color neutral meson. Alternatively, three quarks can exist together, one quark being "red", another "blue", another "green". These three colored quarks together
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