Alternative spellings

• colour charge

Noun

Singular color charge

Plural color charges

color charge (plural color charges)

1. (physics) In the Standard Model of particle physics, a property possessed by quarks, anti-quarks, and gluons that determine rules for how these particles may interact. There are three pairs of colors and anti-colors -- named red, green, and blue, and their corresponding anti-colors (e.g., anti-red). The terminology has nothing to do with visible color.

Related terms

• color force / colour force

In particle physics, color charge is a property of quarks and gluons that is related to the particles' strong interactions in the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Color charge has analogies with the notion of electric charge of particles, but because of the mathematical complications of QCD, there are many technical differences. The "color" of quarks and gluons is completely unrelated to visual perception of color. Rather, it is a whimsical name for a property that has almost no manifestation at distances above the size of an atomic nucleus. The term color was chosen because the abstract property to which it refers has three aspects, which are analogized to the three primary colors of red, green, and blue. By comparison, the electromagnetic charge has a single aspect, which takes the values positive or negative.

Shortly after the existence of quarks was first proposed in 1964, Oscar W. Greenberg introduced the notion of color charge to explain how quarks could coexist inside some hadrons in otherwise identical quantum states without violating the Pauli exclusion principle. The concept turned out to be useful. The theory of quantum chromodynamics has been under development since the 1970s and constitutes an important component of the standard model of particle physics.