〈 Berger | Dillon 〉

@InertialObservr why doesn't the charge of W bosons make Electroweak theory as intractable as QCD is due to the color charge of gluons?

i'm not sure exactly what you mean, but there are quite a lot of relevant distinctions between the two theoreies. One difference is that the em charge is of the W boson is a U(1) gauge symmetry, whereas the gluons arise from an SU(3) nonabeliean gauge theory

I think my question should really be bifurcated: What exactly makes QCD so difficult? Why aren't W bosons 'self interacting' in a similar way to gluons?

(1) what makes QCD so difficult is the fact that quarks and gluons confine to become hadrons and mesons at a certain energy scale Λ. This breakdown of the theory is "predicted" by the fact that the theory becomes non-perturbative at this scale, hence QCD is useless (cont.)

That is, we have no consistent "weakly coupled" theory that tells us what goes on as this transition occurs, only above and below Λ. Below Λ, we have the theory of pions and other mesons, which is known as the "eightfold path"