Quark Confinement: Color Flux Tube

This simulator renders the mechanism behind one of the strangest facts in particle physics: quarks are never seen alone. Two color-charged quarks are linked by a narrow gluon flux tube, and pulling them apart costs energy that grows linearly with distance under the Cornell confinement potential V(r) = -(4/3)(α_sħc)/r + σr. Drag the separation slider or hit "Pull apart" to stretch the string, adjust the string tension σ and coupling α_s to match real lattice-QCD values, and watch live readouts of the potential energy and restoring force. Once the stored energy crosses the pair-production threshold, the flux tube snaps and the vacuum spontaneously creates a new quark–antiquark pair at the break point — exactly the hadronization process that turns quarks into observable particle jets at colliders like the LHC.