Quarks are elementary fermions that constitute a fundamental physical system underlying hadronic matter in the Standard Model of particle physics. They carry color charge and interact via the strong force, mediated by gluons, and also participate in electromagnetic and weak interactions according to their electric charges and weak isospin assignments. Quarks exist in six flavors (up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom) and are confined within composite systems such as baryons and mesons, never observed in isolation due to color confinement. Their dynamics are described by quantum chromodynamics (QCD), where quark fields and their color degrees of freedom form the fundamental components of strongly interacting systems.
According to our current understanding of the universe, quarks are fundamental, point-like particles: basic building blocks that are not made up of smaller particles. A recent paper from the CMS Collaboration describes how ...
General Physics
Apr 16, 2026
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Nearly every object we interact with in our lives has a mass, but where does this mass come from? Modern physics says matter acquires its mass from interaction with a physical vacuum—it is not an empty space, but contains ...
General Physics
Apr 7, 2026
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A new independent measurement by the CMS experiment at the LHC is consistent with the existence of the most massive composite particle ever observed, the momentary union of a top quark and its antiquark
General Physics
Mar 26, 2026
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Scientists from the University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new subatomic particle at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The particle, known as the Ξcc⁺ (Xi‑cc‑plus), is a new type of heavy ...
General Physics
Mar 17, 2026
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Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered experimental evidence that particles of matter emerging from energetic subatomic smashups retain a key feature of virtual particles ...
General Physics
Feb 4, 2026
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In its first moments, the infant universe was a trillion-degree-hot soup of quarks and gluons. These elementary particles zinged around at light speed, creating a "quark-gluon plasma" that lasted for only a few millionths ...
General Physics
Jan 28, 2026
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Describing matter under extreme conditions, such as those found inside neutron stars, remains an unsolved problem. The density of such matter is equivalent to compressing around 100,000 Eiffel Towers into a single cubic centimeter. ...
General Physics
Dec 17, 2025
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A boiling sea of quarks and gluons, including virtual ones—this is how we can imagine the main phase of high-energy proton collisions. It would seem that particles here have significantly more opportunities to evolve than ...
General Physics
Dec 4, 2025
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The CMS collaboration reports the first measurement of the quantum properties of a family of tetraquarks that was recently discovered at the LHC.
General Physics
Dec 3, 2025
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Deep in the heart of the matter, some numbers don't add up. For example, while protons and neutrons are made of quarks, nature's fundamental building blocks bound together by gluons, their masses are much larger than the ...
General Physics
Nov 18, 2025
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