Quarks are the ultimate building blocks of visible matter in the universe.
If we could zoom in on an atom in your body, we would see that it consists of electrons swarming in orbits around a nucleus of protons and neutrons. And if we could zoom in on one of those protons or neutrons, we’d find that they themselves are made up of a trio of particles that are so small that they have almost no size at all, and are little more than points. These point-like particles are the quarks.
Quarks are elementary particles. Like electrons, they are not made up of any other particles. You could say that they are on the ground floor of the Standard Model of particle physics. It turns out that there are actually six types, or flavors, of quarks in total. Besides the up, down, and strange quarks, there are also “charm”, “top” and “bottom” quarks.
Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly observable matter comprises of quarks, down quarks, and electrons.
Owing to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, which include baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons, or in quark–gluon plasmas. For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of hadrons.
For every quark flavor, there is a corresponding type of antiparticle, known as an antiquark, that differs from the quark only in that some of its properties (such as the electric charge) have equal magnitude but opposite signs.
Video Editor: Team 121 Creators (https://bit.ly/team121x)
Narration: Sidhart Viyapu (https://bit.ly/sidvoice)
Project Head: Rajkumar Shukla
Production: World Of Science Media (https://theworldofscience.co)
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