A simple explanation of the nonappearance of physical gluons and quarks

Abstract

We show that the nonappearance 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 (QCD). 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. PACS Nos.: 12.38Aw, 03.70+k, 11.15-q