gluon

A gluon is the particle-representation of the strong force, much as the photon is the particle-representation of electromagnetic radiation. They are found within baryons, holding their three quarks together. A gluon is a type of elementary boson, adhering to Bose-Einstein statistics.

Gluons and quarks carry a type of charge termed color charge, whose behavior is modeled by quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Rather than two polarities (as does electric charge), color charge has three, termed (for convenience), red, green, and blue, as well as their three opposites, anti-red, etc. (These have nothing to do with the color of visible light: the terms are used in analogy.) The three quarks within a baryon continually swap colors through passing gluons one to another, each gluon carrying the color and anti-color necessary to change the color of the receiving quark, such as to leave the entire baryon color-neutral (equal amounts of all three colors).