The realization in the late 1960s that protons, neutrons, and even Yukawa’s pions are all built from quarks changed the direction of thinking about the nuclear binding force. Although at the level of nuclei Yukawa’s picture remained valid, at the more-minute quark level it could not satisfactorily explain what held the quarks together within the protons and pions or what prevented the quarks from escaping one at a time.

The answer to questions like these seems to lie in the property called colour. Colour was originally introduced to solve a problem raised by the exclusion principle that was formulated by the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925. This rule does not allow particles with spin 1/2, such as quarks, to occupy the same quantum state. However, the omega-minus particle, for example, contains three quarks of the same flavour, sss, and has spin 3/2, so the quarks must also all be in the same spin state. The omega-minus particle, according to the Pauli exclusion principle, should not exist.

To resolve this paradox, in 1964–65 Oscar Greenberg in the United States and Yoichiro Nambu and colleagues in Japan proposed the existence of a new property with three possible states. In analogy to the three primary colours of light, the new property became known as colour and the three varieties as red, green, and blue.

The three colour states and the three anticolour states (ascribed to antiquarks) are comparable to the two states of electric charge and anticharge (positive and negative), and hadrons are analogous to atoms. Just as atoms contain constituents whose electric charges balance overall to give a neutral atom, hadrons consist of coloured quarks that balance to give a particle with no net colour. Moreover, nuclei can be built from colourless protons and neutrons, rather as molecules form from electrically neutral atoms. Even Yukawa’s pion exchange can be compared to exchange models of chemical bonding.

This analogy between electric charge and colour led to the idea that colour could be the source of the force between quarks, just as electric charge is the source of the electromagnetic force between charged particles. The colour force was seen to be working not between nucleons, as in Yukawa’s theory, but between quarks. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, theorists turned their attention to developing a quantum field theory based on coloured quarks. In such a theory colour would take the role of electric charge in QED.

It was obvious that the field theory for coloured quarks had to be fundamentally different from QED because there are three kinds of colour as opposed to two states of electric charge. To give neutral objects, electric charges combine with an equal number of anticharges, as in atoms where the number of negative electrons equals the number of positive protons. With colour, however, three different charges must add together to give zero. In addition, because SU(3) symmetry (the same type of mathematical symmetry that Gell-Mann and Neʾeman used for three flavours) applies to the three colours, quarks of one colour must be able to transform into another colour. This implies that a quark can emit something—the quantum of the field due to colour—that itself carries colour. And if the field quanta are coloured, then they can interact between themselves, unlike the photons of QED, which are electrically neutral.

Despite these differences, the basic framework for a field theory based on colour already existed by the late 1960s, owing in large part to the work of theorists, particularly Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills in the United States, who had studied similar theories in the 1950s. The new theory of the strong force was called quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, in analogy to quantum electrodynamics, or QED. In QCD the source of the field is the property of colour, and the field quanta are called gluons. Eight gluons are necessary in all to make the changes between the coloured quarks according to the rules of SU(3).

Asymptotic freedom

In the early 1970s the American physicists David J. Gross and Frank Wilczek (working together) and H. David Politzer (working independently) discovered that the strong force between quarks becomes weaker at smaller distances and that it becomes stronger as the quarks move apart, thus preventing the separation of an individual quark. This is completely unlike the behaviour of the electromagnetic force. The quarks have been compared to prisoners on a chain gang. When they are close together, they can move freely and do not notice the chains binding them. If one quark/prisoner tries to move away, however, the strength of the chains is felt, and escape is prevented. This behaviour has been attributed to the fact that the virtual gluons that flit between the quarks within a hadron are not neutral but carry mixtures of colour and anticolour. The farther away a quark moves, the more gluons appear, each contributing to the net force. When the quarks are close together, they exchange fewer gluons, and the force is weaker. Only at infinitely close distances are quarks free, an effect known as asymptotic freedom. For their discovery of this effect, Gross, Wilczek, and Politzer were awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize for Physics.

The strong coupling between the quarks and gluons makes QCD a difficult theory to study. Mathematical procedures that work in QED cannot be used in QCD. The theory has nevertheless had a number of successes in describing the observed behaviour of particles in experiments, and theorists are confident that it is the correct theory to use for describing the strong force.