Quarks-The Elementary Particle
Quarks
Quarks and Leptons are the building blocks which build up matter, i.e., they are seen as the "elementary particles". In the present standard model, there are six "flavors" of quarks. They can successfully account for all known mesons and baryons (over 200). The most familiar baryons are the proton and neutron, which are each constructed from up and down quarks. Quarks are observed to occur only in combinations of two quarks (mesons), three quarks (baryons), and the recently discovered particles with five quarks (pentaquark).
| Quark | Symbol | Spin | Charge | Baryon Number |
S | C | B | T | Mass* |
|
*The masses should not be taken too seriously, because the confinement of quarks implies that we cannot isolate them to measure their masses in a direct way. The masses must be implied indirectly from scattering experiments. The masses quoted for the U and D are about 1/3 the mass of a proton, since we know the proton has three quarks. But in other combinations they contribute different masses. In the pion, an up and an anti-down quark yield a particle of only 139.6 MeV of mass energy, while in the rho vector meson the same combination of quarks has a mass of 770 MeV! The masses of C and S are from Serway, and the T and B masses are from descriptions of the experiments in which they were discovered.
Each of the six "flavors" of quarks can have three different "colors". The quark forces are attractive only in "colorless" combinations of three quarks (baryons), quark-antiquark pairs (mesons) and possibly larger combinations such as the pentaquark that could also meet the colorless condition. Quarks undergo transformations by the exchange of W bosons, and those transformations determine the rate and nature of the decay of hadrons by the weak interaction
Color Force
A property of quarks labeled color is an essential part of the quark model. The force between quarks is called the color force. Since quarks make up the baryons, and the strong interaction takes place between baryons, you could say that the color force is the source of the strong interaction, or that the strong interaction is like a residual color force which extends beyond the proton or neutron to bind them together in a nucleus.
Inside a baryon, however, the color force has some extraordinary properties not seen in the strong interaction between nucleons. The color force does not drop off with distance and is responsible for the confinement of quarks. The color force involves the exhange of gluons and is so strong that the quark-antiquark pair production energy is reached before quarks can be separated. Another property of the color force is that it appears to exert little force at short distances so that the quarks are like free particles within the confining boundary of the color force and only experience the strong confining force when they begin to get too far apart. The term "asymptotic freedom" is sometimes invoked to describe this behavior of the gluon interaction between quarks.