A Simple explanation of the nonappearance of physical gluons and quarks

Aug, 2002
8 pages
Published in:
  • Can.J.Phys. 80 (2002) 1093-1097
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Abstract:
We show that the non-appearance of gluons and quarks as physical particles is a rigorous and automatic result of the full, i.e. nonperturbative, nonabelian nature of the color interaction in quantum chromodynamics. This makes it in general impossible to describe the color field as a collection of elementary quanta (gluons). Neither can a quark be an elementary quantum of the quark field, as the color field of which it is the source is itself a source, making isolated noninteracting quarks, crucial for a physical particle interpretation, impossible. In geometrical language, the impossibility of quarks and gluons as physical elementary particles arises due to the fact that the color Yang-Mills space does not have a constant trivial curvature. In QCD, the particles ``gluons'' and ``quarks'' are merely artifacts of an approximation method (the perturbative expansion) and are simply absent in the exact theory. This also coincides with the empirical, experimental evidence.
  • quantum chromodynamics: nonperturbative
  • color: interaction
  • quark: confinement
  • gluon: confinement
  • electromagnetic field: Hamiltonian formalism
  • quantum electrodynamics