Proton consists of three quarks have a
different colors
How gluons clue these quarks?
Quarks carry three types of color charge
red, green and blue and antiquarks carry
three types of anticolor
cyan, magenta and yellow.
Gluons carry both color and anticolor.
There are six color mixing gluons
and three colorless gluons
as they carry color and its anticolor.
Some of mixing gluons form gluon-antigluon pairs.
According to Quantum Chromodynamics
3 colorless gluons should combine
into two states.
So there are the 8 gluons at all,
which carry the color charge between
quarks or gluons themselves.
How this works.
Let's look inside proton which consists
of three quarks with different colors
red, green and blue.
Green quarks may emit green-yellow gluon
and becomes blue.
Green-yellow gluon may be absorbed by
blue quarks and it becomes green.
There are a lot of such possibilities.
Important, that each moment the whole system quarks and gluons should be colorless.
In principle
quark may emits colorless gluon. In this
case quarks will not change color
as colorless gluon is a superposition
or a mixing state all colorless gluons.
It can convert to other colorless gluon.
Such gluon will not change the color
of quark
which absorbs its.
Moreover gluons
interact among themselves and may be
transformed
into a new gluons.
One can easily extend this procedure
to another possibilities take into
account a different self interactions
of gluons.
