What are Gluons
In strong interactions the quarks exchange gluons, the carriers of the strong force. Gluons, the vector gauge bosons, carry the color charge of the strong nuclear force. Color charge is analogous to electromagnetic charge, but quarks carry three types of color charge (red, green, blue) and antiquarks carry three types of anticolor (antired, antigreen, antiblue). Gluons may be thought of as carrying both color and anticolor. The strong nuclear force holds most ordinary matter together because it confines quarks into hadron particles such as the proton and neutron. Moreover, the strong force is the force which can hold a nucleus together against the enormous forces of repulsion (electromagnetic force) of the protons is strong indeed.
The strong interaction is very complicated interaction, because it significantly varies with distance. At distances comparable to the diameter of a proton, the strong force is approximately 100 times as strong as electromagnetic force. At smaller distances, however, the strong force between quarks becomes weaker, and the quarks begin to behave like independent particles. In particle physics, this effect is known as asymptotic freedom.
As a result, the strong force can leaks out of individual nucleons (as the residual strong force) to influence the adjacent particle. On the other hand, the strong force cannot reach outside the nucleus. This is due to color confinement, which implies that the strong force acts only between pairs of quarks. Simply, color charged particles (such as quarks and gluons) cannot be isolated (below Hagedorn temperature) and therefore in collections of bound quarks (i.e., hadrons), the net color-charge of the quarks essentially cancels out, resulting in a limit of the action of the forces.
Gluons and Mass of Quarks
The mass of the neutron is 939.565 MeV/c2, whereas the mass of the three quarks is only about 10 MeV/c2 (only about 1% of the mass-energy of the neutron). Like the proton, most of mass (energy) of the neutron is in the form of the strong nuclear force energy (gluons). The quarks of the neutron are held together by gluons, the exchange particles for the strong nuclear force. Gluons carry the color charge of the strong nuclear force.
Therefore, we have to distinguish between current quark mass (also called the mass of the ‘naked’ quarks) and constituent quark mass. Current quark mass refers to the mass of a quark by itself, while constituent quark mass refers to the current quark mass plus the mass of the gluon particle field surrounding the quark.
Noteworthy, because most of your mass is due to the protons and neutrons in your body, your mass (and therefore your weight on a bathroom scale) comes primarily from the gluons that bind the constituent quarks together, rather than from the quarks themselves. Mass is primarily a measure of the energies of the quark motion and the quark-binding fields any real object. It must be noted, gluons are inherently massless, they possess energy.