Since gluons themselves carry color charge (again, unlike the photon which is electrically neutral), they participate in strong interactions. These gluon-gluon interactions constrain color fields to string-like objects called "flux tubes", which exert constant force when stretched. Due to this force, quarks are confined within composite particles called hadrons. This effectively limits the range of the strong interaction to 10-15 meters, roughly the size of an atomic nucleus.
Gluons also share this property of being confined within hadrons. One consequence is that gluons are not directly involved in the nuclear forces. The force mediators for these are other hadrons called mesons.
Although in the normal phase of QCD single gluons may not travel freely, it is predicted that there exist hadrons which are formed entirely of gluons — called glueballs. There are also conjectures about other exotic hadrons in which real gluons (as opposed to virtual ones found in ordinary hadrons) would be primary constituents. Beyond the normal phase of QCD (at extreme temperatures and pressures), quark gluon plasma forms. In such a plasma there are no hadrons; quarks and gluons become free particles.
[edit] Experimental observations
The first direct experimental evidence of gluons was found in 1979 when three-jet events were observed at the electron-positron collider called PETRA at DESY in Hamburg. Quantitative studies of deep inelastic scattering at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center had established their existence a decade before that.
Experimentally, confinement is verified by the failure of free quark searches. Neither free quarks nor free gluons have ever been observed. Although there have been hints of exotic hadrons, no glueball has been observed either. Quark-gluon plasma has been found recently at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratories (BNL).
