Exploring strangeness and the primordial Universe

Physicists believe that in the Universe's first ten microseconds free quarks and gluons filled all of spacetime, forming a new phase of matter named 'quark-gluon plasma' (QGP). Experimental and theoretical work at CERN was ...

The hunt for hot nuclear matter

In particle physics, a jet is a shower of collimated particles generated by a highly energetic quark or gluon. In a lead-lead collision, jets must traverse through quark gluon plasma, altering their energy, track and consistency.

STAR detector has a new inner core


Big Bang query: Mapping how a mysterious liquid became all matter


Compelling evidence for small drops of perfect fluid


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Gluons (pronounced /ˈɡluːɒnz/; from English glue) are elementary particles which act as the exchange particles (or gauge bosons) for the color force between quarks, analogous to the exchange of photons in the electromagnetic force between two charged particles.

Since quarks make up the baryons, and the strong interaction takes place between baryons, one could say that the color force is the source of the strong interaction, or that the strong interaction is like a residual color force which extends beyond the baryons, for example when protons and neutrons are bound together in a nucleus.

In technical terms, they are vector gauge bosons that mediate strong interactions of quarks in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Unlike the electrically neutral photon of quantum electrodynamics (QED), gluons themselves carry color charge and therefore participate in the strong interaction in addition to mediating it, making QCD significantly harder to analyze than QED.
