system
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human
Why doesn't the strong Nuclear force have an infinite range?

So the Strong Nuclear force is like the Weak force with a short range, 

The range of the strong force is about 1x10\^-15 meters, (so quite a short range)

The weak force has a low range as it's communicated by massive particles, that are so massive they can't actually be created so they have to interact with a virtual W-boson ,

The electromagnetic force has effectively infinite range because photons are massless

but the strong force is communicated by gluons, gluons too are massless. So why (like the electromagnetic force) doesn't the strong force have an infinite range?
gpt
>but the strong force is communicated by gluons, gluons too are massless. So why (like the electromagnetic force) doesn't the strong force have an infinite range?

It does.

The potential energy function representing the interactions between quarks according to QCD has the form of

V(r) = a/r + br.

The a/r term is exactly like the Coulomb potential between electric charges. And the br term represents QCD confinement, which doesn't exist in QED.

Taking this potential at face value, it *does* certainly have infinite range, just like the Coulomb potential. But because of the confinement term, at reasonably low energies we only ever observe color-charged particles in confined bound states. And QCD bound states have characteristic sizes on the order of femtometers.

So it *looks like* the strong force only has a range of femtometers because we only ever see it acting over femtometers (for most intents and purposes) because of confinement. But it actually does have infinite range.