Confinement is the absence of isolated color-charged asymptotic states in the physical low-energy spectrum of quantum chromodynamics. Ordinary detected particles are color-singlet hadrons, even when a short-distance reaction is calculated in terms of quarks and gluons.
Pulling a quark and antiquark apart increases the energy stored in their color field. With dynamical light quarks, producing additional quark–antiquark pairs can break the growing flux configuration into separate hadrons rather than yielding two free colored particles. This gives physical intuition for hadronization. It does not supply a complete nonperturbative derivation from the QCD action. High-energy scattering can still resolve partonic structure, so evidence for constituents inside a hadron is consistent with confinement of isolated final states.

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