Home ¦ About Me ¦ Geologist ¦ Favorites
Short Stories ¦ Novels ¦ Plays ¦ Poetry ¦ Childrens ¦ Awards ¦ Quark?
What's a Quark?
The following is from
Wikipedia:
In
particle physics, the quark
(pronounced IPA: /kwɔː(r)k/)
is one of
the two basic constituents of matter
(the other
is the lepton).
Quarks are the only fundamental particles
that
interact through all four of the fundamental forces.
Quarks come in six flavors, and their names (up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom) were also chosen arbitrarily based on the need to name them something that could be easily remembered and used.
Antiparticles of
quarks
are
called antiquarks.
Isolated quarks are never found naturally; they are almost always found in groups of two (mesons) or groups of three (baryons) called hadrons. This is a direct consequence of confinement.
These
are the six flavors
of quarks and their most likely decay modes. Mass decreases
moving from
right to left on the chart. Decay paths are shown by the
arrows.
The letters used are the first letters of each of the flavors.