The preponderance of mass in nucleons is gluon binding energy. From this we see that protons and neutrons both have positive mass. Is there a potential relationship between gluon biding energy and the virtual particles in quantum foam? Consider this in the context of dark matter and dark energy.
The short answer is No.’Nor do gluons have flavor. And this doesn’t have anything to do with dark matter or dark energy. Dark matter is just ordinary matter, with positive mass; its particle content is unknown and it may interact with known matter via weak interactions, in addition to the gravitational interaction, but this doesn't mean its particles would have negative mass.
Negative mass would describe instabilities, stable configurations have positive mass.
Virtual particles don't have a well-defined mass at all.
Dark energy doesn't have anything to do with the interactions mediated by gluons, it's a property of spacetime as a whole and can be perfectly well described by the cosmological constant.
The same answer I gave above applies. Color is just the name for the charge of the strong force. Gluons carry color and they are only sensitive to strong interactions.
(So ``gluon color'' is ovestating things, since ``color=charge of the strong force'' is what gluons transmit.)
If Mach's principle is correct, and the inertia of the particle on Earth depends on the effect from large-scale space -- accelerated expanding spacetime, equivalent to the gravitational field -- that field points to the particle, and the mass of the particle is negative since the field is negative. Then all mass/energy in the universe is negative, and may be defined as positive, since there remains only one type of mass, and the text books can stay as they are.
In principle, I agree with Stam Nicolis, but I would like to add something.
The cosmological constant can be understood as a property of spacetime or as the vacuum energy. The quantum fluctuations in the vacuum are subtracted in quantum field theory because they have no effect, but they do contribute when we consider gravity.
The quantum fluctuations of quarks and gluons can produce vacuum instability. Indeed, the perturbative QCD vacuum is only stable inside hadrons and decays outside into the standard QCD vacuum (a condensate of quark-antiquark pairs). In this sense, there is negative mass in QCD.
I think that the QCD vacuum instability has been related to the cosmological constant, but I cannot recall the references. Sorry.
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