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A visual representation of the division order of universal forces. In physical cosmology, the quark epoch was the period in the evolution of the early universe when the fundamental interactions of gravitation, electromagnetism, the strong interaction and the weak interaction had taken their present forms, but the temperature of the universe was still too high to allow quarks to bind together ...
Quarks have fractional electric charge values – either (− 1 / 3 ) or (+ 2 / 3 ) times the elementary charge (e), depending on flavor. Up, charm, and top quarks (collectively referred to as up-type quarks) have a charge of + 2 / 3 e; down, strange, and bottom quarks (down-type quarks) have a charge of − 1 / 3 e.
Physicists at the time are reluctant to identify these objects with quarks, instead calling them partons — a term coined by Richard Feynman. The objects that are observed at SLAC will later be identified as up and down quarks. Nevertheless, "parton" remains in use as a collective term for the constituents of hadrons (quarks, antiquarks, and ...
In other models, reheating is often considered to mark the start of the electroweak epoch, and some theories, such as warm inflation, avoid a reheating phase entirely. After inflation ended, the universe continued to expand, but at a decelerating rate. About 4 billion years ago the expansion gradually began to speed up again.
The particle would be fragile and fall apart within a millionth of a second in a dozen different ways depending upon its own mass. Unfortunately, the theory did not predict the particle mass making it difficult to find. The particle eluded researchers at a succession of particle accelerators. [15] [better source needed]
At the start of the Big Bang, the universe had an extremely high temperature, which prevented the formation of complex structures like stars, or even very simple ones like atoms. During the Big Bang, a phenomenon called " inflation " took place, in which the universe briefly expanded ("inflated") to a much larger size.
When this is the case, it is as if the recombination to the excited state did not happen in the first place. To account for this possibility, Peebles defines the factor C as the probability that an atom in the first excited state reaches the ground state through either of the two pathways described above before being photoionized.
At that time, however, it was difficult to see how such a model could permanently confine quarks. Han and Nambu also assigned each quark color an integer electrical charge, so that the quarks were fractionally charged only on average, and they did not expect the quarks in their model to be permanently confined.