Quarks and how they work

Quarks:

Quarks are the fundamental constituents of matter including the electron in the universe. Without these three sub-atomic particles, there would be none of us and no universe to speak about.

Surprisingly, all the quarks were not discovered till the mid to late 20th century by a small number of smart physicists, in the United States, namely Murry Gel Man and his team. Quarks number- up-down – strange & charm – top & bottom with equally the same number of anti-quarks too total 12.

When quarks come together, they naturally annihilate each other. The most common quarks are the up and down quarks found in our fundamental particles which make up protons and neutrons in the atom. Two up and one down quark, makes a proton & one up and two down, make up a neutron.

Each quark has a specific charge, a spin and a

flavor or colour which means nothing about the

taste sorry. When we look at the humble carbon

atom (left) as an

example with an

atomic radius is

0.0914 nm, this is

small but things get a

lot smaller as we

unpack the atom. The

carbon atom to the

left, shows six

electrons with a

negative charge

which live around outside the atom in a fog however,

in the nucleus, we have 6 protons which have a

positive + charge and the neutron has 6 with a

neutral charge.

It is said by many that the atom is a lot of nothing - like air, this is true but what they do is miraculous for their miniscule size.

Again, when it comes to size, the electron is the smaller of the group called Leptons. The rest mass of the electron is - 9.1093837015 × 10−31 kg, which is only 1/1,836 the mass of a proton, essentially the same, however when it comes to quarks, the size of a quark is ~10−18 m. It is deemed that quarks are composed of smaller particles but there is no proof at this stage. String theory could be the alternative to this possibility.

Fig 2.0 how protons and neutrons are made.

The US finally announced their joint discovery of the top quark in 1995, the final piece in the puzzle. This completed for the Standard Model of Physics, a complete Lepton group – Fermions, and Higgs and the W Z - force carrier particles. What is missing now is the completion of quantum gravity to finish this profound need. If and when this is done, it paves the way for the completion of the TOE – Theory of Everything.

I hope you enjoyed this little ditty on our humble quark, the smallest particle in the universe.