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.
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