- 2804 - QUARKS - particles we can not see? Quarks are fundamental particles that are hard to see, and almost impossible to measure. They are never found outside the atomic nucleus. These tiny particles are the basis of the family of subatomic particles called “hadrons“.
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--------------- 2804 - QUARKS - particles we can not see?
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- Everyone knows that atoms are made up of electron and protons. Electrons are fundamental particles. But, protons and neutron are not fundamental particles because they are in turn made up of even other fundamental particles. These other fundamental particles in the nucleus of atoms are called “quarks and gluons”.
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- With every discovery in this field of particle physics in the past 50 years many more questions arise about how quarks influence the universe's growth and ultimate fate.
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- The first quarks appeared about 10^minus 12 seconds after the universe was formed, in the same era where the weak force formed. The “weak force” today is the basis for some radioactivity. At that instant moment the weak force separated from the electromagnetic force.
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- A mystery arose in the 1960s when researchers using the Stanford Linear Accelerator found that the electrons were scattering from each other more widely than calculations suggested. More research found that there were at least three locations where electrons scattered more than expected within the nucleon of atoms, meaning something was causing that scattering. That started the basis for our understanding of quarks today.
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- Murray Gell-Mann, the co-proposer for the quark model in the 1960s, drew inspiration for the spelling from the 1939 James Joyce book "Finnegan's Wake," which read: "Three quarks for Muster Mark! / Sure he has not got much of a bark / And sure any he has it's all beside the mark."
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- Quarks come in six different flavors. Protons are made of two up quarks and one down quark, while neutrons contain two down quarks and one up quark. Physicists refer to the different types of quark as flavors: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top.
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- The biggest differentiation between the flavors is their mass, but some also differ by charge and by spin. For instance, while all quarks have the same spin of 1/2, three of them (up, charm and top) have charge 2/3, and the other three (down, strange and bottom) have charge minus 1/3.
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- And just because a quark starts out as a particular flavor doesn't mean it will stay that way; down quarks can easily transform into up quarks, and charm quarks can change into strange quarks.
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- An ordinary proton or neutron is formed of three quarks bound together by gluons, the carriers of the color force. Above a critical temperature, protons and neutrons and other forms of hadronic matter 'melt' into a hot, dense soup of free quarks. An ordinary proton or neutron is formed of three quarks bound together by gluons, carriers of the color force.
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- Above this critical temperature, protons and neutrons and other forms of hadronic matter 'melt' into a hot, dense soup of free quarks and gluons, called the quark-gluon “plasma“.
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- Quarks can't be measured, because the energy required produces an antimatter equivalent (called an antiquark) before they can be observed separately. The mass of quarks is best determined by techniques such as using a supercomputer to simulate the interactions between quarks and gluons, with gluons being the particles that glue the quarks together.
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- In 2014, researchers published the first observation of a “charm quark” decaying into its antiparticle, providing more information about how matter behaves. Because particles and antiparticles should destroy each other, one would think the universe should just have photons and other elementary particles. Yet antiphotons and antiparticles still exist, leading to the mystery of why the universe is made mostly of matter and not equal parts of antimatter.
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- Nailing down the mass of the top quark could reveal to researchers one of two ghastly scenarios: that the universe could end in 10 billion years, or if the top quark is heavier than expected, energy carried through the vacuum of space could collapse.
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- Behind the Scenes at Humongous U.S. Atom Smasher is a computer simulation of a collision of two beams of gold nuclei in the STAR detector. The beams travel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light before colliding. The resulting particles fly in all directions to be measured by the cylinder-shaped detector.
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- The mass of quarks is best determined by techniques such as using a supercomputer to simulate the interactions between quarks and gluons, with gluons being the particles that glue quarks together.
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- The first observation of a charm quark decaying into its antiparticle in 2014 provided more information about how matter behaves. Because particles and antiparticles should destroy each other, one would think the universe should just have photons and other elementary particles. Yet antiphotons and antiparticles still exist, leading to the mystery of why the universe is made mostly of matter and not antimatter.
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- Nailing down the mass of the top quark could reveal to researchers one of two ghastly scenarios. The universe could end in 10 billion years; If the top quark is heavier than expected, energy carried through the vacuum of space could collapse.
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- If space collapses we will likely collapse with it! End of story.
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- August 30, 2020 2804
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