Quark
A quark (/kwɔːrk, kwɑːrk/) is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei.[1] 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.[2][3][nb 1] For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of hadrons.
Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. They are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction, and weak interaction), as well as the only known particles whose electric charges are not integer multiples of the elementary charge.
There are six types, known as flavors, of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.[4] Up and down quarks have the lowest masses of all quarks. 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. Because of this, up and down quarks are generally stable and the most common in the universe, whereas strange, charm, bottom, and top quarks can only be produced in high energy collisions (such as those involving cosmic rays and in particle accelerators). For every quark flavor there is a corresponding type of antiparticle, known as an antiquark, that differs from the quark only in that some of its properties (such as the electric charge) have equal magnitude but opposite sign.
The quark model was independently proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964.[5] Quarks were introduced as parts of an ordering scheme for hadrons, and there was little evidence for their physical existence until deep inelastic scattering experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1968.[6][7] Accelerator experiments have provided evidence for all six flavors. The top quark, first observed at Fermilab in 1995, was the last to be discovered.[5]
The quark model was independently proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann[24] and George Zweig[25][26] in 1964.[5] The proposal came shortly after Gell-Mann's 1961 formulation of a particle classification system known as the Eightfold Way – or, in more technical terms, SU(3) flavor symmetry, streamlining its structure.[27] Physicist Yuval Ne'eman had independently developed a scheme similar to the Eightfold Way in the same year.[28][29] An early attempt at constituent organization was available in the Sakata model.
At the time of the quark theory's inception, the "particle zoo" included, among other particles, a multitude of hadrons. Gell-Mann and Zweig posited that they were not elementary particles, but were instead composed of combinations of quarks and antiquarks. Their model involved three flavors of quarks, up, down, and strange, to which they ascribed properties such as spin and electric charge.[24][25][26] The initial reaction of the physics community to the proposal was mixed. There was particular contention about whether the quark was a physical entity or a mere abstraction used to explain concepts that were not fully understood at the time.[30]
In less than a year, extensions to the Gell-Mann–Zweig model were proposed. Sheldon Lee Glashow and James Bjorken predicted the existence of a fourth flavor of quark, which they called charm. The addition was proposed because it allowed for a better description of the weak interaction (the mechanism that allows quarks to decay), equalized the number of known quarks with the number of known leptons, and implied a mass formula that correctly reproduced the masses of the known mesons.[31]
In 1968, deep inelastic scattering experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) showed that the proton contained much smaller, point-like objects and was therefore not an elementary particle.[6][7][32] Physicists were reluctant to firmly identify these objects with quarks at the time, instead calling them "partons" – a term coined by Richard Feynman.[33][34][35] The objects that were observed at SLAC would later be identified as up and down quarks as the other flavors were discovered.[36] Nevertheless, "parton" remains in use as a collective term for the constituents of hadrons (quarks, antiquarks, and gluons).
The strange quark's existence was indirectly validated by SLAC's scattering experiments: not only was it a necessary component of Gell-Mann and Zweig's three-quark model, but it provided an explanation for the kaon (
K
) and pion (
π
) hadrons discovered in cosmic rays in 1947.[37]
In a 1970 paper, Glashow, John Iliopoulos and Luciano Maiani presented the so-called GIM mechanism to explain the experimental non-observation of flavor-changing neutral currents. This theoretical model required the existence of the as-yet undiscovered charm quark.[38][39] The number of supposed quark flavors grew to the current six in 1973, when Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa noted that the experimental observation of CP violation[nb 3][40] could be explained if there were another pair of quarks.
Charm quarks were produced almost simultaneously by two teams in November 1974 (see November Revolution) – one at SLAC under Burton Richter, and one at Brookhaven National Laboratory under Samuel Ting. The charm quarks were observed bound with charm antiquarks in mesons. The two parties had assigned the discovered meson two different symbols, J and ψ; thus, it became formally known as the
J/ψ
meson. The discovery finally convinced the physics community of the quark model's validity.[35]
In the following years a number of suggestions appeared for extending the quark model to six quarks. Of these, the 1975 paper by Haim Harari[41] was the first to coin the terms top and bottom for the additional quarks.[42]
In 1977, the bottom quark was observed by a team at Fermilab led by Leon Lederman.[43][44] This was a strong indicator of the top quark's existence: without the top quark, the bottom quark would have been without a partner. However, it was not until 1995 that the top quark was finally observed, also by the CDF[45] and DØ[46] teams at Fermilab.[5] It had a mass much larger than had been previously expected,[47] almost as large as that of a gold atom.[48]
Post a Comment