Quantum chromodynamics

Standard Model of particle physics
Elementary particles of the Standard Model
Background Particle physics Standard Model Quantum field theory Gauge theory Spontaneous symmetry breaking Higgs mechanism
Constituents Electroweak interaction Quantum chromodynamics CKM matrix Standard Model mathematics
Limitations Strong CP problem Hierarchy problem Neutrino oscillations Physics beyond the Standard Model
Scientists Rutherford Thomson Chadwick Bose Sudarshan Davis Jr Anderson Fermi Dirac Feynman Rubbia Gell-Mann Kendall Taylor Friedman Powell Anderson Glashow Iliopoulos Lederman Maiani Meer Cowan Nambu Chamberlain Cabibbo Schwartz Perl Majorana Weinberg Lee Ward Salam Kobayashi Maskawa Mills Yang Yukawa 't Hooft Veltman Gross Pais Pauli Politzer Reines Schwinger Wilczek Cronin Fitch Vleck Higgs Englert Brout Hagen Guralnik Kibble de Mayolo Lattes Zweig
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In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the study of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons. Quarks are fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a type of quantum field theory called a non-abelian gauge theory, with symmetry group SU(3). The QCD analog of electric charge is a property called color. Gluons are the force carriers of the theory, just as photons are for the electromagnetic force in quantum electrodynamics. The theory is an important part of the Standard Model of particle physics. A large body of experimental evidence for QCD has been gathered over the years.

QCD exhibits three salient properties:

• Color confinement. Due to the force between two color charges remaining constant as they are separated, the energy grows until a quark–antiquark pair is spontaneously produced, turning the initial hadron into a pair of hadrons instead of isolating a color charge. Although analytically unproven, color confinement is well established from lattice QCD calculations and decades of experiments.^[1]
• Asymptotic freedom, a steady reduction in the strength of interactions between quarks and gluons as the energy scale of those interactions increases (and the corresponding length scale decreases). The asymptotic freedom of QCD was discovered in 1973 by David Gross and Frank Wilczek,^[2] and independently by David Politzer in the same year.^[3] For this work, all three shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.^[4]
• Chiral symmetry breaking, the spontaneous symmetry breaking of an important global symmetry of quarks, detailed below, with the result of generating masses for hadrons far above the masses of the quarks, and making pseudoscalar mesons exceptionally light. Yoichiro Nambu was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for elucidating the phenomenon in 1960, a dozen years before the advent of QCD. Lattice simulations have confirmed all his generic predictions.