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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 ...
Quarks are the fundamental constituents of hadrons and interact via the strong force. Quarks are the only known carriers of fractional charge, but because they combine in groups of three quarks (baryons) or in pairs of one quark and one antiquark (mesons), only integer charge is observed in nature.
All quarks are assigned a baryon number of 1 / 3 . Up, charm and top quarks have an electric charge of + 2 / 3 , while the down, strange, and bottom quarks have an electric charge of − 1 / 3 . Antiquarks have the opposite quantum numbers. Quarks are spin- 1 / 2 particles, and thus fermions. Each quark or antiquark ...
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.
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 ...
This state is thought to consist of asymptotically free strong-interacting quarks and gluons, which are ordinarily confined by color confinement inside atomic nuclei or other hadrons. This is in analogy with the conventional plasma where nuclei and electrons, confined inside atoms by electrostatic forces at ambient conditions, can move freely ...
Together with the quarks, these particles were referred to as partons by Richard Feynman. [10] Properties. The gluon is a vector boson, which means it has a spin of 1.
Like all other quarks, the top quark is a fermion with spin-1/2 and participates in all four fundamental interactions: gravitation, electromagnetism, weak interactions, and strong interactions. It has an electric charge of + 2 / 3 e. It has a mass of 172.76 ± 0.3 GeV/c 2, [1] which is close to the rhenium atom mass.