Re: Do gluons also travel in waves?

If gluons were massless, then the strong force would be similar
to the gravitational and electromagnetic forces.  However, under the
conditions which currently exist in our universe, gluons are not massless.
They are very heavy, and only exist inside strongly interacting particles
like protons and neutrons.  Therefore, under current conditions, we can't
see any strong waves.

In the very early universe things were very different, and gluons were not
confined in this way.  We believe that at very high temperatures there is
a phase transition into a different state of matter, called the quark-gluon
plasma.  In order to study the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, a
large machine called the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) has been
built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.  To learn more about RHIC,
click here.