Eli5: What exactly are quarks…how many are there…and is there anything smaller?
In: 47
We know of nothing smaller than a quark. There are some string theory ideas but the whole “is string theory science?” question leaves that issue unresolved.
The Standard Model has six flavors of quarks (types of quarks): up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top.
Quarks are currently believed to be some of the fundamental building blocks of everything. Fundamental meaning that they are not made of anything smaller than them.
Currently we have identified six types of Quarks called Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Charmed, and Strange
Quarks don’t exist alone in nature but rather combine to form more complex particles called Hadrons which include Protons and Neutrons that make up matter.
Other particles in the scale of quarks include the Electron and Photon (light)
There’s other fundamental particles that we know of besides these, lookup the ‘standard model’
Preons are hypothetical point particles that Quarks could be made out of, but so far we have no evidence to prove that anything smaller than Quarks exists.
String theory also postulates that Quarks are made of smaller particles, but again unproven
Quarks are, according to our most successful model, fundamental particles. They have no components, they simply “are”. There are 6 different types of quarks, though only two of them are stable over time. Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom.
Quarks are what hadrons are made of, the hadrons are split into two groups, baryons and mesons. There are 6 that exist, up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. They can only exist in isolation in extremely high energy environments that haven’t existed since the first microseconds of the universe, so we only see evidence of their existing by smashing different baryons and mesons together.
Up, charm, and top quarks all have a charge of +2/3 e where e is the elementary charge (a proton has a charge of 1e and an electron has a charge of -1e)
Down, stange, and bottom quarks all have a charge of -1/3 e
Baryons are made of 3 quarks each, some you may be familiar with are uud (proton) and udd (neutron) any combination of 3 quarks works, and you will always end up with a charge of +2e, +1e, 0e, or -1e
Mesons are made of a quark and anti quark pair, and are important in high level particle physics, so we won’t go into these much. They always have a charge of +1e, 0e, or -1e regardless of how you combine them. Ie an up and anti down quark makes a pion+, which has a charge of +1e
We used to think there were only up and down quarks, until one day we found something that looked like a down quark, but had way more mass than it should. We thought this was strange, so we named it the strange quark. We were confused by this, so we kept looking until we found something to restore symmetry to the standard model of particles. This made everything look nice again, so we thought it was charming and named it the charm quark. We did some math and figured out that another pair of quarks should be possible, but anything beyond those two would take more energy than is in the universe, so since these two quarks would be the limit of what’s possible, we called them the top and bottom quarks.
At this time, we believe quarks to be fundamental particles, as well as the family of leptons (electrons and neutrinos) so wee can’t break then down any further without reducing them to pure energy.
[The standard model](https://www.pngfind.com/pngs/m/110-1103032_the-standard-model-of-elementary-particles-standard-model.png)
Quarks are a type of fundamental particle in the same way that atoms are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons. There are 6 types of quarks and 6 types of leptons (e.g. electrons). Anything made of leptons and quarks is a type of matter; anything made of other things, like bosons, is not.
There are 6 types of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. Other than the top, all of them could be found in a normal-sized piece of matter if you looked hard enough.
Quarks have a charge (positive or negative), a color (red, green, or blue), and a quark-ness (up or down). Electrons have a charge and a quark-ness, but no color. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks: protons have 2 ups and a down, neutrons have 2 downs and an up. So if you put enough of them together in the right way you could make anything out of them.
Quarks get their name from James Joyce. The scientist who named them was a fan and wrote in a note to a colleague that he found them to be as distant from reality as the fictitious Quark.
they are kind of the atoms of atoms. They make up the particles like the proton and neutron.
there are 6 types of quarks: up down top bottom strange and charm as well as their respective antimatter variants
as to the question if there is anything smaller. they are considered point-like (so they don’t actually have a size)
Quarks are a type of fundamental particle under the standard model of particle physics. This is a model based on our understanding of the particles and forces in the universe, which consists of a small number of fundamental particles that can be broken down any further. So according to the model, quarks are fundamental and cannot be broken down any further.
Quarks sit on the same level as electrons and photons in terms of being fundamental, these also cannot be broken down up any further under the standard model. Quarks make up protons and neutrons (and a vast array of other constituent particles). They do so by interacting via the strong force, which has rigid rules for what combinations of quarks are allowed, based on concepts like colour charge and exchange of gluons.
The existence of quarks is necessary to explain what keeps atoms together. You might be aware that an atom is comprised of a bunch of protons and neutrons bunched together into a tight nucleus, which is orbited by negatively charged electrons. You might’ve wondered what keeps the protons in the nucleus of an atom together, given they are all positively charged and like charges will repel. Well in a nucleus two main forces compete against one another, electrostatic repulsion, and the strong force attraction. Quarks explain the strong force attraction, the strong force keeps the quarks together to form the protons and neutrons, and these particles in close proximity experience a residual strong force, quarks in adjacent nucleons interact with one another as well.
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