Quarks: smallest particle ever known

Kevin A. Alicea Marrero 

A quark is the elementary particle and the fundamental constituent of matter. They are known as the smallest particle ever known. There are six types of quarks (flavors): up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. Physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig proposed quarks in 1964. The up and down quarks are the ones with the lowest mass. The other ones (strange, charm, bottom, and top) eventually end up being up and downs because of the particle decay. That’s why those are the most stable of all. As we know, protons and neutrons are the most stable particles and that’s because, protons in specific, are a combination to two up quarks (one red and one blue) and one down quark (green). Therefore, up and down quarks are the most common. The other four can be produced in high-energy collisions such as cosmic rays and in particles accelerators. 

The six of them can be identified by their properties such as: electric charge, color charge, mass, and spin. Quarks are the only fundamental particles that experience all four fundamental forces like: electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interactions, and weak interactions. Quarks have a spin of ½ and are the only particles whose electric charge are not integer multiples. They’re also divided in three generations. The first one include ups and downs, the second one includes charms and strange, and the third one include tops and bottoms. Also their masses increase in each generation. For each quark, there’s a corresponding type of antiquark. Antiquarks are particles that differ form quarks. They have the same magnitude as quarks but opposite sign. They’re identified with a bar on top of the symbol.

Gell-Mann took his time to decide the particle’s name back in 1963. He had the sound but he wasn’t quite sure of it’s spelling. He didn’t knew how to write it until he saw the word “quark” in James Joyce’s book, Finnegans Wake, which in that time meant: the cry of the gull. Gell-Mann took this word from the phrase “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” and it has another purpose other that just the word; and it’s the number three in the sentence that fitted perfectly the way quarks occurs in nature. 

I’ve always been kind of interested in the creation of the Universe, planets, life, etc. This time I was in search of something that answered one of many questions I make myself. So I looked for something simple but interesting and I found these quarks. This couldn’t get more simple in more than one sense, one is because it isn’t difficult to understand and second because it literally one of the most simple things by being the fundamental constituent of matter. This shows me the main components of things and of the components of the subatomic particles that I thought they were the smallest things that ever existed. I pretty much enjoyed this class because it has so many interesting thing that explain the why and how of our daily life and I hope to stay this interested in physics because it’s the simplest of all sciences and helps us each day of our lives.