What is a Quark?
A quark is a tiny theoretical particle that makes up protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus. Along with gluons, quarks also make up more exotic hadrons such as mesons, which are not stable. The quark is called theoretical because while assuming its existence makes for a better physics theory, it has never been observed directly. Along with leptons — electrons, muons, the tau, and their associated neutrinos and antiparticles — quarks make up all the visible matter in the universe. Quarks are the only fundamental particles which interact with each other through all four fundamental forces: strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetic force, and gravity. A basic property of quarks is confinement — all quarks make up hadrons, and are necessarily never independent. Descriptions of the physical properties of quarks emerged from quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong nuclear force which holds the atomic nucleus together. Like all other subatomic particles,
I had to look it up, but I learned something. So, according to Wikipedia, and I quote: A quark (IPA: /kwɔrk/) is a generic type of physical particle that forms one of the two basic constituents of matter, the other being the lepton. Various species of quarks combine in specific ways to form protons and neutrons, in each case taking exactly three quarks to make the composite particle in question. There are six different types of quark, usually known as flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. (Their names were chosen arbitrarily based on the need to name them something that could be easily remembered and used.) The strange, charm, bottom and top varieties are highly unstable and died out within a fraction of a second after the Big Bang; they can be recreated and studied by particle physicists. The up and down varieties survive in profusion, and are distinguished by (among other things) their electric charge. It is this which makes the difference when quarks clump together to
A quark, in this theory, is a collision cell of light strings. The light strings intermix in this collision cell, and form a very special pair of mirror-like surfaces that support the phenomenon of charge. The collision cell (quark) is conserving several properties of the colliding strings, and is a quasi-particle, or constituent particle in a larger structure. The larger particle structure is generally conserved by the laws of baryon number or lepton number conservation. A particle generally requires quarks in multiples of three for stability, possibly as a function of conservation of integer charge. These conservation laws govern the cosmological existence of stable elementary particles, and should be construed at this level as constraints imposed by the geometry of space-time for elementary particles, of which quarks are subordinate entities. Only three types of quarks are dealt with in this theory, Up, Down, and an Up quark which pins an external string to emulate a Down quark, cal
Asked by: Cheri Garrett Answer A quark is a fundamental particle which possesses both electric charge and ‘strong’ charge. They combine in groups of two or three to form composite objects (called mesons and baryons, respectively), held together by the strong force. Protons and neutrons are familiar examples of such composite objects — both are made up of three quarks. The quarks come in six different species (physicists call them ‘flavors’), each of which have a unique mass. The two lightest, unimaginatively called ‘up’ and ‘down’ quarks, combine to form protons and neutrons. The heavier quarks aren’t found in nature and have so far only been observed in particle accelerators. How do we know they exist? At first many physicists felt they were no more than fictitious entities invented to make certain particle physics calculations easier (legend has it that Murray Gell-Mann took the name from a word in James Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’). However, particle physics experiments over the last
