system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Could we detect strong force waves and weak force waves just like we detect gravity waves and electromagnetic waves?
gpt
There can't be "strong waves" or "weak waves". Just like EM waves are coherent states of photons, and gravitational waves are coherent states of gravitons, your strong waves or weak waves would be coherent states of gluons or W/Z bosons.

However, gluons don't really exist. That is, there is a gluon field, but it cannot have waves, and you really cannot create a state with a gluon. This has to do with a property of Yang-Mills theories (of which quantum chromodynamics is an example), namely that they have a negative beta function - rougly, the higher the energy scale, the smaller the strength of the force. (EM does exactly the opposite).

This means two obvious things: 1) in the limit of very high energies, the colour force becomes weak. This is asymptotic freedom. 2) in the limit of very low energies (such as room temperature) the colour force is extremely strong. This is confinement.

Confinement is what is important to us. This effect makes sure the force between coloured states is so large that they cannot ever be seen. Taking a meson and trying to pull the quark and antiquark apart does not allow you to see the bare colour of the quarks - you just get more mesons.

So confinement is commonly formulated at: there exist only colourless, or white, states. Indeed hadronic physics has a very rich spectrum of thousands of states bound by the strong force, baryons and mesons (and more exotic beasts apparently), all rigorously white.

Now in Yang-Mills theory (and so also in QCD) the gauge bosons themselves (the carrier particles) are also charged under the interaction they mediate. (Precisely, they're in the adjoint representation). So if there was such a thing as an actual gluon, which is coloured, you could change reference frame to get it to an arbitrarily low energy (you can do this only because the gluon is massless). As the energy is very low, confinement applies and you get a contradiction.

More practically gluons interact with other virtual gluons constantly, in such a strong way that a clean state with a single gluon does not simply exist, let alone coherent states of gluons in macroscopic waves. It just cannot be created. If you give energy to the vacuum, all you'll be able to do is create colourless states. No gluons, and no quarks either. The lightest particle possible in QCD (the mass gap) is the pion.

People often say the colour force is short-ranged, and so this would be a very easy argument against colour waves. This is incorrect, since the range of the strong force is infinite as the gluon is massless. Instead, the actual reason is QCD is confining, and all of the above.

For the weak force, the mediating bosons are very massive and very unstable. W bosons decay to quark-antiquark or lepton-antineutrino, and they do so in the general order of 10^(-25) seconds. So that immediately kills the idea of a "weak wave".