A simple explanation of the non-appearance of physical gluons and quarks

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.