So yeah, protons and neutrons have 3 quarks, with spins, and rgb colors… what’s all of that?
In: Physics
When you get down to quantum stuff, it’s best to just stop thinking of things in a way that normally makes sense. Take spin, which is a quantum property of particles. It’s not like the particle is spinning like a top… but it also kind of is? Best way to think of it is that it’s like electric charges – it’s just a property that particles have. Certain types of particles have whole number spin, others have fractional spin. The spin number will tell you how that particle acts in certain conditions. Stuff with fractional spin makes up what we call *matter* and is all the hard, physical stuff that takes up space. Integer spin doesn’t take up space – it can overlap and occupy the same space, like photons.
Quarks have 1/2 spin, but they can be combined in ways to create particles with integer spin – eg: a quark and an antiquark both have 1/2 so together they have a spin of 1. That composite particle – a meson – acts like photons and doesn’t take up space. Protons and neutrons have three quarks, which adds up to 3/2 spin, making protons and neutrons *fermions* which take up space.
Color charge has nothing to do with visible color. It’s just another kind of charge. Electric charge has positive and negative, which at up to zero. Color charge has red, green, and blue which add up to white. Thats where the name comes from, it’s an analogy because white light is made of those three colors and quarks *always always always* combine in a way that makes a “white” color charge.
There are also three anti-color charges, anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue. So, quarks can either combine in pairs as a color and anti-color, which adds up to neutral “white”, or they come in threes as red, green, and blue which add up to neutral “white”. Quarks absolutely cannot ever ever ever ever ever ever be alone, at all, under any known conditions.
When you try to pull quarks apart, they create a “flux tube” between them that stretches like a rubber band. The more you pull them apart, the more energy gets stored in this “rubber band” flux tube. At the instant when the quarks are far enough apart to separate, the flux tube collapse and the energy stored in it creates two new quarks which bind up with the first two.
As far as anyone knows, quarks are fundamental. They can’t be split into smaller pieces, and they aren’t made of anything. They are packets of energy, waves in a “quark field” just like how photons are packets of energy which are waves in the electromagnetic field, and electrons are packets of energy that are waves in the electron field.
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