User:Infamousbandersnatch/sandbox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A quark (/ˈkwɔːrk/ or /ˈkwɑːrk/) represents an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which amount to protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei.[1] Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, we can never directly observe quarks or find them in isolation; we can find them only within hadrons, such as baryons (of which protons and neutrons portray examples), and mesons.[2][3] For this reason, much of what we know about quarks draws from observations of the hadrons themselves.
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Composition | Elementary particle |
---|---|
Statistics | Fermionic |
Generation | 1st, 2nd, 3rd |
Interactions | Electromagnetism, Gravitation, Strong, Weak |
Symbol | q |
Antiparticle | Antiquark ( q ) |
Theorized | Murray Gell-Mann (1964) George Zweig (1964) |
Discovered | SLAC (~1968) |
Types | 6 (up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top) |
Electric charge | +2⁄3 e, −1⁄3 e |
Color charge | Yes |
Spin | 1⁄2 |
Baryon number | 1⁄3 |
Physicists have classified quarks into six types, known as flavors: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top.[4] Up and down quarks have the lowest masses of all quarks. The heavier quarks rapidly change into up and down quarks through a process of particle decay: the transformation from a higher mass state to a lower mass state. Because of this, up and down quarks generally remain stable and the most common in the universe, whereas we can only produce strange, charm, top, and bottom quarks in high energy collisions (such as those involving cosmic rays and in particle accelerators).
Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, color charge and spin. Quarks act as the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction, and weak interaction), as well as the only known particles whose electric charges we can not represent with integer multiples of the elementary charge. For every quark flavor there exists a corresponding type of antiparticle, known as an antiquark, that differs from the quark only in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign.
Physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently proposed the quark model in 1964.[5] They introduced quarks as parts of an ordering scheme for hadrons, and until deep inelastic scattering experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1968, little evidence for their physical existence has come to conscious awareness.[6][7] Physicists have since observed all six flavors of quark in accelerator experiments; the top quark, first observed at Fermilab in 1995, and the last discovered.[5]