electromagnetic interaction and the Yukawa interaction. As an example, quantum electrodynamics contains a Dirac field representing the electron field and a vector field representing the electromagnetic field (photon field). (Despite its name, the quantum electromagnetic "field" actually corresponds to the classical electromagnetic four-potential, rather than the classical electric and magnetic fields.) The full QED Lagrangian density is: where are Dirac matrices, , and is the electromagnetic field strength. The parameters in this theory are the (bare) electron mass and the (bare) elementary charge . The first and second terms in the Lagrangian density correspond to the free Dirac field and free vector fields, respectively. The last term describes the interaction between the electron and photon fields, which is treated as a perturbation from the free theories. Shown above is an example of a tree-level Feynman diagram in QED. It describes an electron and a positron annihilating, creating an off-shell photon, and then decaying into a new pair of electron and positron. Time runs from left to right. Arrows pointing forward in time represent the propagation of positrons, while those pointing backward in time represent the propagation of electrons. A wavy line represents the propagation of a photon. Each vertex in QED Feynman diagrams must have an incoming and an outgoing fermion (positron/electron) leg as well as a photon leg. Gauge symmetry If the following transformation to the fields is performed at every spacetime point (a local transformation), then the QED Lagrangian remains unchanged, or invariant: where is any function of spacetime coordinates. If a theory's Lagrangian (or more precisely the action) is invariant under a certain local transformation, then the transformation is referred to as a gauge symmetry of the theory. Gauge symmetries form a group at every spacetime point. In the case of QED, the successive application of two different local symmetry transformations and is yet another symmetry transformation . For any , is an element of the group, thus QED is said to have gauge symmetry. The photon field may be referred to as the gauge boson. is an Abelian group, meaning that the result is the same regardless of the order in which its elements are applied. QFTs can also be built on non-Abelian groups, giving rise to non-Abelian gauge theories (also known as Yang–Mills theories). Quantum chromodynamics, which describes the strong interaction, is a non-Abelian gauge theory with an gauge symmetry. It contains three Dirac fields