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All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks and electrons. Owing to a phenomenon known as color confinement , quarks are never found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, which include baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons , or in quark–gluon plasmas .
The Dirac Lagrangian of the quarks coupled to the gluon fields is given by = ¯, where is a three component column vector of Dirac spinors, each element of which refers to a quark field with a specific color charge (i.e. red, blue, and green) and summation over flavor (i.e. up, down, strange, etc.) is implied.
An atom consists of a small, heavy nucleus surrounded by a relatively large, light cloud of electrons. An atomic nucleus consists of 1 or more protons and 0 or more neutrons. Protons and neutrons are, in turn, made of quarks. Each type of atom corresponds to a specific chemical element. To date, 118 elements have been discovered or created.
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 ...
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An animation of color confinement, a property of the strong interaction.If energy is supplied to the quarks as shown, the gluon tube connecting quarks elongates until it reaches a point where it "snaps" and the energy added to the system results in the formation of a quark–antiquark pair.
Low-energy electrons do scatter in this way, but, above a particular energy, the protons deflect some electrons through large angles. The recoiling electron has much less energy and a jet of particles is emitted. This inelastic scattering suggests that the charge in the proton is not uniform but split among smaller charged particles: quarks.
Electrons surround a nucleus made of protons and neutrons, which contain up and down quarks. The second and third generations of charged particles do not occur in normal matter and are only seen in extremely high-energy environments such as cosmic rays or particle accelerators.