On 16/04/2013 11:06 PM, Tom Roberts wrote:
Not really. It is energetically infeasible for them to do so. This is so
because gluons carry color charge, the force that holds the nucleons and
nucleus together. If a gluon managed to get even few fermis outside the
nucleus, it would be energetically favorable to create a
quark-anti-quark pair with the correct color charges to neutralize the
color force. Now you no longer have a gluon outside the nucleus, you
have a (color neutral) meson....

What sort of energy levels are required to create quark-antiquark
virtual particle? How much energy do these gluons have anyways? These
quark/antiquark pairs would annihilate to form a gamma-ray photons
eventually anyways.

I'm speaking VERY loosely here....

Experimentally, no isolated quark or gluon has ever been observed. The
above is a very loose description of the theoretical mechanism that
explains this.


Is it because they eventually turn to gamma rays?

Yousuf Khan