Color confinement, often simply called confinement, is the physics phenomenon that color charged particles (such as quarks) cannot be isolated singularly, and therefore cannot be directly observed. Quarks, by default, clump together to form groups, or hadrons. The two types of hadrons are the mesons (one quark, one antiquark) and the baryons (three quarks). The constituent quarks in a group cannot be separated from their parent hadron, and this is why quarks can never be studied or observed in any more direct way than at a hadron level.
Read more about Color Confinement: Origin, Models Exhibiting Confinement, Models of Fully Screened Quarks
Famous quotes containing the words color and/or confinement:
“For the profit of travel: in the first place, you get rid of a few prejudices.... The prejudiced against color finds several hundred millions of people of all shades of color, and all degrees of intellect, rank, and social worth, generals, judges, priests, and kings, and learns to give up his foolish prejudice.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)