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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 are generally stable and the most common in the universe , whereas strange, charm, bottom, and top quarks can only be produced in high energy ...
Computer generated cut-away view of ALICE showing the 18 detectors of the experiment. ALICE is designed to study high-energy collisions between lead nuclei.These collisions mimic the extreme temperature and energy density that would have been found in the fractions of a second after the Big Bang by forming a quark–gluon plasma, a state of matter in which quarks and gluons are unbound.
But, it is worth noting that for studies of physics at the electroweak scale, the scattering events are initiated by a single quark or gluon from each proton, and so the actual energy involved in each collision will be lower as the total centre of mass energy is shared by these quarks and gluons (determined by the parton distribution functions).
Quarks are always confined in an envelope of gluons that confer vastly greater mass to the mesons and baryons where quarks occur, so values for quark masses cannot be measured directly. Since their masses are so small compared to the effective mass of the surrounding gluons, slight differences in the calculation make large differences in the ...
Analysis of the results led to the conclusion that hadrons do indeed have internal structure. The experiments were important because not only did they confirm the physical reality of quarks, but also proved again that the Standard Model was the correct avenue of research for particle physicists to pursue.
The colored small double circles inside are gluons. In nuclear physics and particle physics , the strong interaction , also called the strong force or strong nuclear force , is a fundamental interaction that confines quarks into protons , neutrons , and other hadron particles.
The quarks' color charge are also visible. The neutrons and protons in the atomic nuclei are baryons – the neutron is composed of two down quarks and one up quark, and the proton is composed of two up quarks and one down quark. [29] A baryon is composed of three quarks, and a meson is composed of two
Therefore, any strange quarks or antiquarks observed in experiments have been "freshly" made from the kinetic energy of colliding nuclei, with gluons being the catalyst. [9] Conveniently, the mass of strange quarks and antiquarks is equivalent to the temperature or energy at which protons, neutrons and other hadrons dissolve into quarks. This ...