Gluons are the force carriers of the strong force between quarks. For example three quarks form baryons (like neutrons and protons) and two quarks form mesons (like pions). Gluons are quanta of the strong-interaction, so they are elementary particles on themselves.

For one, quarks are confined within larger particles, so they cannot be separated and studied in isolation. Also, the force between two quarks becomes larger as they move farther apart, whereas the force between a nucleus and an electron, or two nucleons in a nucleus, grows weaker as their separation increases.

What you can see is that as the quarks separate there is an energy field that grows as the distance between the quarks becomes larger. It is this energy field that contributes to forming a meson.

The gluon is a vector boson of eight flavors,with spin 1 like the photon,color is a real charge,it is a conveniently proposed to avoid the Pauli exclusion http://principle.So ,so far it is not well established that there is anti-gluon.

Mesons are routinely produced artificially in cyclotrons or other accelerators in the collisions of protons, antiprotons, or other particles. Because quarks have a spin 12, the difference in quark number between mesons and baryons results in conventional two-quark mesons being bosons, whereas baryons are fermions.

Gluons were detected by the jets of hadronic particles they produce in a particle detector soon after they are first created. Sometimes one of the final-state quarks radiates a gluon just before it “hadronizes” (that is, forms into hadrons such as protons, pions, neutrons, etc.).

gluon, an elementary particle that mediates, or carries, the strong, or nuclear, force. Gluons are massless, travel at the speed of light, and possess a property called color.

In that respect, gluons are rather like photons – the particles of light that transmit the electromagnetic force. Gluons bind together the particles called quarks to form protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.

That means also that any other form of interaction (strong, electromagnetic, neutral weak, or gravitative) does not change the flavor (masses) of given quarks (but could at most create or annihilate quark anti-quark pairs; leaving the number of quarks per species constant).

In the original theory, two up quarks and a down quark add up to make a charge of positive one – or a proton. The different combination of quarks gave them a different mass. This combination of charge and mass, as well as a few more esoteric qualities, make up the ”flavor” of each quark.

The quark group includes six particles including: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. The lepton group includes the electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino, electron, muon and Tau particles.

In particular, the action of the weak force is such that it allows the conversion of quantum numbers describing mass and electric charge of both quarks and leptons from one discrete type to another. This is known as a flavour change, or flavour transmutation.

Protons and neutrons are made of quarks, but electrons aren’t. As far as we can tell, quarks and electrons are fundamental particles, not built out of anything smaller. You can’t have half a quark or one-third of an electron.