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.
In late 2023, Wojciech Brylinski was analyzing data from the NA61/SHINE collaboration at CERN for his thesis when he noticed an unexpected anomaly—a strikingly large imbalance between charged and neutral kaons in argon–scandium ...
General Physics
Mar 28, 2025
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In a new development at CERN, researchers at the LHCb collaboration have determined the spin-parity of singly heavy charm baryons for the first time, addressing a long-standing mystery in baryon research.
Scientists have now mapped the forces acting inside a proton, showing in unprecedented detail how quarks—the tiny particles within—respond when hit by high-energy photons.
General Physics
Feb 21, 2025
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Carnegie Mellon University's Professor Curtis Meyer and his research colleagues explore an uncharted world inside protons and neutrons. For the first time, researchers have provided measurements describing a maximum boundary ...
General Physics
Feb 11, 2025
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In the first study of its kind at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the CMS collaboration has tested whether top quarks adhere to Einstein's special theory of relativity. The research is published in the journal Physics Letters ...
General Physics
Jan 23, 2025
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A new analysis of data from the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) reveals fresh evidence that collisions of even very small nuclei with large ones might create tiny specks of a quark-gluon plasma ...
General Physics
Jan 15, 2025
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At extremely high densities, quarks are expected to form pairs, as electrons do in a superconductor. This high-density quark behavior is called color superconductivity. The strength of pairing inside a color superconductor ...
General Physics
Jan 14, 2025
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Protons and other subatomic particles that are subject to the strong nuclear force have a complex structure that involves even more fundamental constituents called quarks and gluons. These quarks and gluons bind under the ...
General Physics
Jan 13, 2025
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The ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has released a new high-precision measurement of the lifetime of the electrically neutral beauty (B0) meson—a hadron composed of a bottom antiquark and a down quark.
General Physics
Dec 19, 2024
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Queen Mary University of London physicist Professor Chris White, along with his twin brother Professor Martin White from the University of Adelaide, have discovered a surprising connection between the Large Hadron Collider ...
Quantum Physics
Dec 19, 2024
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