Meson

A meson is a hadron with integer spin, conventionally composed of a quark and an antiquark. Mesons are unstable and participate in the strong interaction.

Quark: An elementary fermion that combines with other quarks through the strong interaction to form hadrons. A quark supplies one constituent of the conventional meson structure.
Quantum chromodynamics: The theory of quarks, gluons, and their strong interactions. It describes the force that binds a meson's constituents.
Pion: The lightest meson family, consisting of charged and neutral pseudoscalar particles. Pions are the lightest mesons and dominate low-energy nuclear interactions.
Baryon: A hadron with half-integer spin, conventionally composed of three quarks. Baryons contrast with mesons in spin and conventional constituent structure.
Yukawa interaction: A short-range interaction described by exchange of a massive field or particle. Yukawa's meson-exchange model explained why nuclear forces have limited range.
Antiquark: The antiparticle of a quark, carrying opposite electric charge and other additive quantum numbers. An antiquark pairs with a quark in the conventional meson structure.
Gluon: A massless gauge boson that mediates the strong interaction between color-charged particles. Gluons transmit the strong force inside mesons.
Kaon: A meson containing a strange quark or antiquark and a light up or down partner. Kaons introduced striking examples of strangeness and matter–antimatter asymmetry.
Glueball: A hypothesized color-neutral hadron made predominantly of gluons. A glueball would be a hadron without the conventional quark–antiquark valence structure.
Nuclear force: The residual strong interaction that binds protons and neutrons inside atomic nuclei. Meson exchange provides an influential description of this force at low energies.

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