Gluons are just the manifestation of the curvature of the color field.

Just like photons arise from the curvature of the electric charge field.

This is extremely complicated, it's called gauge theory.

> Is there a link where I could read more?

Ask your favourite LLM, it will explain much better.

Or 5 hour video on the subject, but with all the math:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfeeIwmb_hw

That's a great question getting to the heart of the physics at play, so please don't apologize. A good model for quark-quark interaction is to imagine them in the context of their color charge, which acts like a complex form of the more familiar concept of EM charge. Since they carry this charge they're coupled to the strong force in a manner analogous to the more familiar EM flux tubes. When you add energy to the qq system you're adding energy this flux tube and making the whole system "hotter". Eventually instead of one flux tube defining one qq interaction you get the "snap" and end up with 2 flux tubes and two qq pairs. Assuming that you aren't still dumping energy into the system with some way to confine it, everything is going to fly apart and rapidly cool down. This leads to the really neat part, the reason we see particle showers at colliders and elsewhere: Hadronization. You can think of this as the condensation of Hadrons from the high energy quark-gluon plasma you find in conditions like a particle accelerator of sufficient capability, or the very early universe.

So in the model of two proton beams near c intersecting you essentially have the protons go through a phase change- they almost melt into a quark-gluon plasma that's stupendously hot- followed by a rapid condensation into a showers of kaons, pions, new protons... all of it adds up to the original mass of the protons in the collision. If you surround the area of that collision with EXTREMELY sensitive calorimeters and devices designed to monitor this process you can do some incredible accounting to find out what if anything is missing. That missing bit would be a possible new particle, some new physics, or as is often the case a chance to learn more about possible errors in measurement.

https://modern-physics.org/hadronization/

https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-ph...

https://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C990809/docs/webber.pdf