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.
The LHCb collaboration recently reported on the arXiv preprint server the first observation of the decay of the Bc+ meson (composed of two heavy quarks, b and c) into a J/ψ charm-anticharm quark bound state and a pair of ...
General Physics
Mar 4, 2024
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118
A study led by Prof. Chen Xurong at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has provided new insights into the origins of proton mass. From an experimental standpoint, the researchers ...
General Physics
Feb 28, 2024
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206
Neutron stars in the universe, ultracold atomic gases in the laboratory, and the quark–gluon plasma created in collisions of atomic nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): they may seem totally unrelated but, surprisingly ...
General Physics
Feb 16, 2024
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290
Collisions of high energy particles produce "jets" of quarks, anti-quarks, or gluons. Due to the phenomenon called confinement, scientists cannot directly detect quarks. Instead, the quarks from these collisions fragment ...
Quantum Physics
Jan 29, 2024
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560
Atomic nuclei are made of nucleons (like protons and neutrons), which themselves are made of quarks. When crushed at high densities, nuclei dissolve into a liquid of nucleons and, at even higher densities, the nucleons themselves ...
Condensed Matter
Dec 29, 2023
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1909
String theory found its origins in an attempt to understand the nascent experiments revealing the strong nuclear force. Eventually another theory, one based on particles called quarks and force carriers called gluons, would ...
General Physics
Dec 20, 2023
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463
Quark gluon plasma (QGP) is an exciting state of matter that scientists create in a laboratory by colliding two heavy nuclei. These collisions produce a QGP fireball. The fireball expands and cools following the laws of hydrodynamics, ...
General Physics
Dec 20, 2023
4
175
