The forces that bind protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus are so strong that when they break, the result is a nuclear explosion. Perhaps a bond that strong is necessary in order to overcome the huge electric repulsion between same charge protons. Hence, the standard model calls the force that holds quarks together in a nucleus the strong force. It has the odd property that it is zero at short range but increases as quarks separate, an effect analogous to stretching a rubber band. It exchanges no energy, so it isn’t electromagnetic, and increases with distance, so it isn’t gravity. The standard model needed a new force to explain how the atomic nucleus was held together.
Its answer was quantum chromodynamics, a field theory derived from quantum electrodynamics (QED), the theory that explains light. QED explains electromagnetism as perturbations caused when an electromagnetic field absorbs or emits photons, as shown in Feynman diagrams. Its calculations produced infinities, but they were removed by renormalization, a mathematical trick that arbitrarily subtracts infinities to get the finite answers desired.
Aiming to repeat the success of QED, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) proposed that a new strong field emitted particles called gluons that had a color charge. In essence, the strong field gluons acted to cause effects just as the electromagnetic field’s photons did. The gluons then used red, blue and green charges to bind quarks in a proton just as photons bind electrons in atoms, but with three values not two. The red, blue and green charges were said to cancel to white, just as positive and negative charges cancel to neutral. Three colors needed anti-colors to work, so to turn a red quark blue needs an anti-red gluon as well as a blue gluon. It was tricky, but the calculations worked, and in 1978 the PLUTO project managed to interpret a three-jet Upsilon event in gluon terms, so gluons joined the standard model particle pantheon. Meaning didn’t matter, so no-one asked why a universal field through all space existed for an effect that applied only to quarks.
A processing model approaches the same facts differently, based on reverse engineering rather than devising a field to fit the facts. The quark structure in Figure 4.11 shows it has free photons in one axis, so they could link quarks that are close together in a quark plasma. The free photons of one quark could insert themselves into another as shown in Figure 4.12, where an extreme photon has its head in one node and tail in another. It is now proposed that when quarks are side-by-side, the extra photons in a quark’s free axis insert themselves into a nearby quark like hooks.
This photon sharing would then give a bond that is initially zero but increases with distance, because as linked quarks separate, the shared photon wavelength increases to release the energy needed to pull them back together. The more the quarks separate, the stronger the effect, so quarks side-by-side experience no force but are pulled together as they separate. In effect, shared photons could be the elastic bands that hold quarks together. If the strong force is based on quarks sharing photons, could this let quarks combine to fill all the channels of a point plane to achieve stability?