Eli5 what are quarks?
In: 7
If Atoms are the things your molecules are made of, then quarks are the things your atoms are made of.
They are the most fundamental particles in the universe, among other particles.
What they are physically are some type of vibration or excitation in their quantum field.
Similar to how the atomic particles have positive electric charges, quarks have what’s called color charge: Red, Green, or Blue. Quarks have this property where they must combine in a way that all the colors balance out either in threes: Red + Green + Blue, Anti-Red + Anti-Blue + Anti-Green, or in twos of any color + it’s anti-color.
individual quarks also have electic charge, either 2/3s of positive or 1/3 of negative. The Color charge of a quark is not related to it’s Electric charge or what type of quark it is.
Three quarks combine to form composite particles like protons and neutrons.
Quarks are elementary particles of which protons and neutrons are made of. Due to their peculiar properties, quarks are impossible to isolate, they can only exist as part of a whole. Electrons are not made of quarks.
Everything is made of *stuff*, you’re made of skin and bones and organs and blood and hair.
If you look at a bit of, say, skin, under a microscope, it has a couple of different layers and things going through it, and these are different kinds of tissue.
If you zoom the microscope even further, you’ll see each kind of tissue is made up of similar looking ‘building blocks’, these are called cells.
If you keep zooming in, cells are made of molecules, which are made of atoms. If something is made of all the same kind of atom we call it an element.
An atom is the smallest part of matter that can exist on its own. The periodic table of elements is a chart of all the different kinds of atoms that we know exist.
Atoms are made of subatomic particles – protons, which carry a positive electrical charge, electrons, which carry a negative charge, and neutrons, which carry no charge.
A quark is the next smallest particle down, it’s a part of a proton. If there’s an even smaller thing that makes up quarks then we don’t have the technology to observe it yet, so they’re one of the smallest things that we know exists. This makes them a *fundamental particle*. If something is fundamental that means it’s the base thing that everything else is built on.
Other kinds of fundamental particles are: Electrons, photons, muons, tau, electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, tau neutrinos, gluons, w bosons, z bosons, and higgs bosons
So fundamental particles make up subatomic particles, subatomic particles make up atoms, atoms make up molecules, and molecules make up stuff!
Here’s a song about quarks by Hank Green! https://youtu.be/RQ73z9wo6k8
I think Hank Green put it well when he said
> A quark is a fundamental constituent of matter
> Observed in 1968 through deep elastic scatter
> We found that protons aren’t as simple as we thought
> We thought they were solid particles but they are not
>
> Protons in fact are made up of three separate pieces
> It just gets more confusing as our knowledge increases
> But that is what a quark is; It’s a piece of a proton
> And they also make up other things including the neutron
[Strange Charm](https://youtu.be/U0kXkWXSXRA)
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