Are there any particles smaller than quarks inside quarks?
No one really knows. The current quark model seems to work fine at the energies we can currently explore with particle accelerators .Some theoreticians believe, however, that even more tightly packed particles may exist which combine to form the quarks, electrons and the elusive Higgs Boson. These theories call these particles, variously, rishons or stratons and require a super-strong nuclear force to bind them tightly within the known ‘fundamental’ particles. The field theory that describes this new layer in structure is called ‘technicolor’ because a new kind of charge is needed on these new fundamental particles that has some of the attributes of the quark’s ‘color’ charge, and the various flavors of charges that make up the electrons, muons and tauons. It is hoped that in the new generation of more powerful accelerators we might see some signs of this new level of structure, or evidence that it doesn’t exist at all. Stay tuned!
