Quarks

 I actually did study quarks in high-school chemistry, but that was so long ago, I thought I’d take another look at them. And, no, I’m not talking about the bar owner on Deep Space 9; my high school days were long before that particular TV show came along.

I’m very glad to report that what I learned in high school chemistry is still true, that a quark is a fundamental piece of matter, making up protons and neutrons, the things that make up atomic nuclei in all matter.

Quarks have various properties; electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. They also are the only elementary particles that experience all 4 fundamental interactions; electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction and weak interaction.

There are 6 types of quarks, known as flavors. These are up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. (My personal favorite flavor is lime green with orange polka dots, but that flavor hasn’t been discovered yet.)

The up and down quarks have the lowest mass. 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. This generally makes the up and down quarks the most stable and the most common in the universe.

For every quark flavor, there is an equal but opposite antiquark. Yes, the antiquark differs from its corresponding quark in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign.

As my high school teacher said, quarks are strange little things. They have a fractional electric charge value of either -1/3 or +2/3 of the elementary charge, depending on their flavor. Those with +2/3 e include the up, charm and top quarks, while the rest have -1/3 e. Antiquarks, of course, have an opposite charge to their corresponding quarks; the up, charm and top antiquarks have charges of -2/3 e, and the other antiquarks have a charge of +1/3 e.

In the atomic nuclei, Neutrons have no electrical charge, because they are made of 2 down quarks (-1/3 e each) and 1 up quark (+2/3 e). Similarly, the proton has a positive charge of 1e, because they are made up of 2 up quarks (+2/3 e each) and 1 down quark (-1/3 e).

So, I learned some new stuff about quarks, couldn’t make sense of other stuff in the article. May have to consider getting a new chemistry textbook, or maybe a textbook on particle physics. And then find the time to actually study it.

Oh, I did see that quarks have a color (red, green and blue), as well as a flavor, but alas, still no lime green with orange polka dots. I’m sure they’ll show up eventually.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark