2015-16

Physics
201
Investigatory Project

5-
16
Primary Unit
Quark’s

of Elementary
particles.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my special thanks of

gratitude to my teacher (Miss. Meenu Rana) as
well as our principal (Mr. Satyaveer Singh)who
gave me the golden opportunity to do this
wonderful project on the topic (QUARKS), which
also helped me in doing a lot of Research and i
came to know about so many new things I am
really thankful to them.

Secondly i would also like to thank my parents and

friends who helped me a lot in finalizing this
project within the limited time frame.
Quarks:-
A quark is an Elementary particle and
found constituent of Matter.The quark model was
independently proposed by physicists Murray Gell-
Mann and George Zweig in 1964. Quarks combine
to form composite particles called Hadrons
(Particles on which strong force acts e.g.:-
Protons, neutrons, pions, baryons, mesons),
the most stable of which are Protons and Neutrons,
the composition of atomic nuclei. Due to a
phenomenon known as Color confinement, quarks
are never directly observed or found in isolation;
they can be found only within hadrons, such as
baryons and mesons.
Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including
electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin.
Quarks are the only elementary particles in the
Standard model of particle physics to experience
all four fundamental interactions, also known as
fundamental forces (electromagnetism,gravitation,
strong interaction, and weak interaction), as well
as the only known particles whose electric charges
are not integer multiples of the elementary charge.
There are six types of quarks, known as flavors: up,
down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. Up and
down quarks have the lowest masses of all quarks.
The heavier quarks rapidly change into up and
down quarks through a process of particle decay:
the transformation from a higher mass state to a
lower mass state. Because of this, up and down
quarks are generally stable and the most common
in the universe, whereas strange, charm, bottom,
and top quarks can only be produced in high
energy collisions (such as those involving cosmic
rays and in particle accelerators). For every quark
flavor there is a corresponding type of antiparticle,
known as an antiquark, that differs from the quark
only in that some of its properties have equal
magnitude but opposite sign.
Quarks are ½ spin particles, implying that they are
fermions according to the spin - statistics theorem.
They are subject to the Pauli Exclusion Principle,
which states that no two identical fermions can
simultaneously occupy the same quantum state.
This is in contrast to bosons, any number of which
can be in same state. Unlike leptons, quarks
possess color charge, which causes them to
engage in the strong interaction. The resulting
attraction between different quarks causes the
formation of composite particles known as
hadrons.
The quarks which determine the quantum numbers
of hadrons are called valance quarks; apart from
these, any hadron can contain an indefinite
number of virtual quarks, antiquarks, and gluons
which do not influence its quantum numbers. There
are two families of hadrons: baryons, with three
valence quarks, and mesons, with a valence quark
and an antiquark. The most common baryons are
the proton and the neutron, the building blocks of
the atomic nucleus. A great number of hadrons are
known, most of them differentiated by their quark
content and the properties these constituent
quarks confer. The existence of "exotic" hadrons
with more valence quarks, such as tetraquarks
(qqqq) and pentaquarks (qqqqq), has been
conjectured but not proven. However, on 13 July
2015, the LHCb collaboration at CERNreported
results consistent with pentaquark states.
Elementary fermions are grouped into three
generations, each comprising two leptons and two
quarks. The first generation includes up and down
quarks, the second strange and charm quarks, and
the third bottom and top quarks. All searches for a
fourth generation of quarks and other elementary
fermions have failed, and there is strong indirect
evidence that no more than three generations
exist. Particles in higher generations generally
have greater mass and less stability, causing them
to decay into lower-generation particles by means
of weak interactions. Only first-generation (up and
down) quarks occur commonly in nature. Heavier
quarks can only be created in high-energy
collisions (such as in those involving cosmic rays),
and decay quickly; however, they are thought to
have been present during the first fractions of a
second after the Big Bang, when the universe was
in an extremely hot and dense phase (the quark
epoch). Studies of heavier quarks are conducted in
artificially created conditions, such as in particle
accelerators.
Having electric charge, mass, color charge, and
flavor, quarks are the only known elementary
particles that engage in all four fundamental
interactions of contemporary physics:
electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction,
and weak interaction. Gravitation is too weak to be
relevant to individual particle interactions except
at extremes of energy (Planck energy) and
distance scales (Planck distance). However, since
no successful quantum theory of gravity exists,
gravitation is not described by the Standard Model.

HISTORY:-
The quark model was proposed by
physicistsMurray Gell-Mann and George
Zweig in 1964. At the time of the Quark theory’s
inception, the “particle zoo” included, amongst
other particles, a multitude of Hadrons. Gell-
Mann and Zweig posited that they were not
elementary particles, but were instead composed
of combinations of quarks and antiquarks. Their
model invoked three flavors of quarks, up, down,
and strange, to which they ascribed properties
such as spin and electric charge. There was
particular contention about whether the quark was
a physical entity or a mere abstraction used to
explain concepts that were not fully understood at
the time.
In less than a year, extensions to the Gell-Mann-
Zweig model were proposed. Sheldon Lee Glashow
and James Bjorken predicted the existence of
fourth flavor of quark, which they called Charm.
The addition was proposed because it allowed for a
better description of the weak interaction (the
mechanism that allows quarks to decay),
equalized the number of known quarks with the
number of known leptons, and implied a mass
formula that correctly reproduced the masses of
the known mesons.
In 1968, deep inelastic scattering experiments at
the Stanford Linear Accelerator center (SLAC)
showed that the proton contained much smaller,
point-like objects and was therefore not an
elementary particle. Physicists were reluctant to
firmly identify these objects with quarks at the
time, instead calling them “partons”-a term given
by Richard Feynman. The objects were later
identified as up and down quarks as the other
flavors were discovered. Nevertheless,”parton”
remains in use as a collective term for the
constituents of hadrons (quarks, antiquarks, and
gluons).
The strange quark’s existence was indirectly
validated by SLAC’s scattering experiments: not
only necessary component of Gell-Mann and
Zweig’s three-quark model, but it provided an
explanation for the kaon (K) and pion (π) hadrons
discovered in cosmic rays in 1947.
In 1970 paper, Glashow, John Iliopouos and Luciano
Maiani presented the so called GIM mechanism to
explain the experimental non-observation of flavor-
changing neutral currents. This theoretical model
required the existence of the as-yet undiscovered
charm quark.
Charm quarks were produced almost
simultaneously by two teams in November 1974.
One at SLAC under Burton Richter, and one at
Brookhaven National Laboratory under
Samuel Ting. The charm quarks were observed
bound with charm antiquarks in mesons. The two
parties had assigned the discovered meson two
different symbols, J and ; thus, it became formally
known as the J/ meson.
In following years a number of suggestions
appeared for extending the quark model to six
quarks. Of these, in 1975 paper by Haim Harari
was the first to coin the terms top and bottom for
the additional quarks.
In 1977, the bottom quark was observed by a
team at Fermilab led by Leon Lederman. This was
a strong indicator of the top quark’s existence. It
was in 1995 that top quark was finally observed,
also by the CDF and D teams at Fermilab.
It had a mass much larger than had been
previously expected, almost as larger as that of a
Gold Atom.
Etymology:-
For some time, Gell-Mann was undecided on an
actual spelling for the term he intended to coin,
until he found the word QUARK in James Joyce’s
book Finnegans Wake:-
Three QUARKS for muster Mark!
Gell-Mann went into further detail regarding the
name quark in his book The Quark and the
Jaguar.
In 1963 he assigned the name Quark to the
fundamental constituent of Nucleon.
Zweig preferred the name ace for the particle he
had theorized, but Gell-Mann’s terminology came
to prominence once the quark model had been
commonly accepted.
The quark flavors were given their names for
several reasons. The up and down quarks are
named after the up and down components of
isospin, which they carry. Strange quarks were
given their names because they were discovered
to be components of the strange particles
discovered in cosmic rays years before the quark
model was proposed; these particles were deemed
“strange” because they had unusually long
lifetimes. Glashow, who co-proposed Charm quark
with Bjorken, is quoted as saying,” We called our
construct the ‘charmed quark’, for we were
fascinated and pleased by the symmetry it brought
to the Sub-nuclear world”. The names “bottom”
and “top”, coined by Harari, were chosen because
they are “logical partners for up and down quarks”.
In the past, bottom and top quarks were
sometimes referred to as “beauty” and “truth”
respectively. Therefore accelerator complexes
devoted to massive production of bottom quarks
are sometimes called “beauty factories”.
Properties
Electric charge
Quarks have fractional electric charge values –
either 1⁄3 or 2⁄3 times the elementary charge (e),
depending on flavor. Up, charm, and top quarks
(collectively referred to as up-type quarks) have a
charge of +2⁄3 e, while down, strange, and bottom
quarks (down-type quarks) have −1⁄3 e. Antiquarks
have the opposite charge to their corresponding
quarks; up-type antiquarks have charges of −2⁄3 e
and down-type antiquarks have charges of +1⁄3 e.
Since the electric charge of a hadron is the sum of
the charges of the constituent quarks, all hadrons
have integer charges: the combination of three
quarks (baryons), three antiquarks (antibaryons),
or a quark and an antiquark (mesons) always
results in integer charges.[52] For example, the
hadron constituents of atomic nuclei, neutrons and
protons, have charges of 0 e and +1 e
respectively; the neutron is composed of two down
quarks and one up quark, and the proton of two up
quarks and one down quark.[12]
Spin
Spin is an intrinsic property of elementary
particles, and its direction is an important degree
of freedom. It is sometimes visualized as the
rotation of an object around its own axis (hence the
name "spin"), though this notion is somewhat
misguided at subatomic scales because
elementary particles are believed to be point-like.
[53]

Spin can be represented by a vector whose length

is measured in units of the reduced Planck
constant ħ (pronounced "h bar"). For quarks, a
measurement of the spin vector component along
any axis can only yield the values +ħ/2 or −ħ/2; for
this reason quarks are classified as spin-1⁄2
particles.[54] The component of spin along a given
axis – by convention the z axis – is often denoted
by an up arrow ↑ for the value +1⁄2 and down
arrow ↓ for the value −1⁄2, placed after the symbol
for flavor. For example, an up quark with a spin of
+1⁄2 along the z axis is denoted by u↑.
Weak interaction
A tree diagram consisting mostly of straight
arrows. A down quark forks into an up quark and a
wavy-arrow W[superscript minus] boson, the latter
forking into an electron and reversed-arrow
electron antineutrino.
Feynman diagram of beta decay with time flowing
upwards. The CKM matrix (discussed below)
encodes the probability of this and other quark
decays.
A quark of one flavor can transform into a quark of
another flavor only through the weak interaction,
one of the four fundamental interactions in particle
physics. By absorbing or emitting a W boson, any
up-type quark (up, charm, and top quarks) can
change into any down-type quark (down, strange,
and bottom quarks) and vice versa. This flavor
transformation mechanism causes the radioactive
process of beta decay, in which a neutron (n)
"splits" into a proton (p), an electron (e−) and an
electron antineutrino (ν
e) (see picture). This occurs when one of the down quarks in the
neutron (udd) decays into an up quark by emitting a virtual W−
boson, transforming the neutron into a proton (uud). The W−
boson then decays into an electron and an electron
antineutrino.[56]
n → p + e− + ν
e (Beta decay, hadron notation)
udd → uud + e− + ν
e (Beta decay, quark notation)

Both beta decay and the inverse process of

inverse beta decay are routinely used in medical applications
such as positron emission tomography (PET) and in experiments
involving neutrino detection.
Three balls "u", "c", and "t" noted "up-type quarks" stand above
three balls "d", "s", "b" noted "down-type quark". The "u", "c",
and "t" balls are vertically aligned with the "d", "s", and b" balls
respectively. Colored lines connect the "up-type" and "down-
type" quarks, with the darkness of the color indicating the
strength of the weak interaction between the two; The lines "d"
to "u", "c" to "s", and "t" to "b" are dark; The lines "c" to "d"
and "s" to "u" are grayish; and the lines "b" to "u", "b" to "c",
"t" to "d", and "t" to "s" are almost white.
The strengths of the weak interactions between the six quarks.
The "intensities" of the lines are determined by the elements of
the CKM matrix.

While the process of flavor transformation is the same for all

quarks, each quark has a preference to transform into the quark
of its own generation. The relative tendencies of all flavor
transformations are described by a mathematical table, called
the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix (CKM matrix).
Enforcing unitarity, the approximate magnitudes of the entries
of the CKM matrix are:[57]

where Vij represents the tendency of a quark of flavor i to

change into a quark of flavor j (or vice versa).
There exists an equivalent weak interaction matrix for leptons
(right side of the W boson on the above beta
decay diagram), called the Pontecorvo–Maki–
Nakagawa–Sakata matrix (PMNS matrix).
Together, the CKM and PMNS matrices
describe all flavor transformations, but the
links between the two are not yet clear.
Strong interaction and color charge
See also: Color charge and Strong interaction
A green and a magenta ("antigreen") arrow
canceling out each other out white,
representing a meson; a red, a green, and a
blue arrow canceling out to white, representing
a baryon; a yellow ("antiblue"), a magenta,
and a cyan ("antired") arrow canceling out to
white, representing an antibaryon.
All types of hadrons have zero total color
charge.
The pattern of strong charges for the three colors of quark,
three antiquarks, and eight gluons (with two of zero charge
overlapping).

According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), quarks possess

a property called color charge. There are three types of color
charge, arbitrarily labeled blue, green, and red.[nb 5] Each of
them is complemented by an anticolor – antiblue, antigreen,
and antired. Every quark carries a color, while every antiquark
carries an anticolor.

The system of attraction and repulsion between quarks charged

with different combinations of the three colors is called strong
interaction, which is mediated by force carrying particles known
as gluons; this is discussed at length below. The theory that
describes strong interactions is called quantum
chromodynamics (QCD). A quark, which will have a single color
value, can form a bound system with an antiquark carrying the
corresponding anticolor. The result of two attracting quarks will
be color neutrality: a quark with color charge ξ plus an
antiquark with color charge −ξ will result in a color charge of 0
(or "white" color) and the formation of a meson. This is
analogous to the additive color model in basic optics. Similarly,
the combination of three quarks, each with different color
charges, or three antiquarks, each with anticolor charges, will
result in the same "white" color charge and the formation of a
baryon or antibaryon.

In modern particle physics, gauge symmetries – a kind of

symmetry group – relate interactions between particles (see
gauge theories). Color SU(3) (commonly abbreviated to SU(3)c)
is the gauge symmetry that relates the color charge in quarks
and is the defining symmetry for quantum chromodynamics.
Just as the laws of physics are independent of which directions
in space are designated x, y, and z, and remain unchanged if the
coordinate axes are rotated to a new orientation, the physics of
quantum chromodynamics is independent of which directions in
three-dimensional color space are identified as blue, red, and
green. SU(3)c color transformations correspond to "rotations" in
color space (which, mathematically speaking, is a complex
space). Every quark flavor f, each with subtypes fB, fG, fR
corresponding to the quark colors, forms a triplet: a three-
component quantum field which transforms under the
fundamental representation of SU(3)c. The requirement that
SU(3)c should be local – that is, that its transformations be
allowed to vary with space and time – determines the
properties of the strong interaction, in particular the existence
of eight gluon types to act as its force carriers.
Mass
Current quark masses for all six flavors in comparison, as balls
of proportional volumes. Proton and electron (red) are shown in
bottom left corner for scale.

Two terms are used in referring to a quark's mass: current

quark mass refers to the mass of a quark by itself, while
constituent quark mass refers to the current quark mass plus
the mass of the gluon particle field surrounding the quark.
These masses typically have very different values. Most of a
hadron's mass comes from the gluons that bind the constituent
quarks together, rather than from the quarks themselves. While
gluons are inherently massless, they possess energy – more
specifically, quantum chromodynamics binding energy (QCBE) –
and it is this that contributes so greatly to the overall mass of
the hadron (see mass in special relativity). For example, a
proton has a mass of approximately 938 MeV/c2, of which the
rest mass of its three valence quarks only contributes about 11
MeV/c2; much of the remainder can be attributed to the gluons'
QCBE.

The Standard Model posits that elementary particles derive

their masses from the Higgs mechanism, which is related to the
Higgs boson. Physicists hope that further research into the
reasons for the top quark's large mass of ~173 GeV/c2, almost
the mass of a gold atom, might reveal more about the origin of
the mass of quarks and other elementary particles.
Table of properties

The following table summarizes the key properties of the six

quarks. Flavor quantum numbers (isospin (I3), charm (C),
strangeness (S, not to be confused with spin), topness (T), and
bottomness (B′)) are assigned to certain quark flavors, and
denote qualities of quark-based systems and hadrons. The
baryon number (B) is +1⁄3 for all quarks, as baryons are made of
three quarks. For antiquarks, the electric charge (Q) and all
flavor quantum numbers (B, I3, C, S, T, and B′) are of opposite
sign. Mass and total angular momentum (J; equal to spin for
point particles) do not change sign for the antiquarks.
Quark flavor properties
Name Symbol Mass (MeV/c2)* J B Q (e) I3
C S T B′ Antiparticle Antiparticle symbol
First generation
Up u 2.3±0.7 ± 0.5 1⁄2 +1⁄3 +2⁄3 +1⁄2 0 0 0 0
Antiup u
Down d 4.8±0.5 ± 0.3 1⁄2 +1⁄3 −1⁄3 −1⁄2 0 0 0
0 Antidown d
Second generation
Charm c 1275±25 1⁄2 +1⁄3 +2⁄3 0 +1 0 0 0
Anticharm c
Strange s 95±5 1⁄2 +1⁄3 −1⁄3 0 0 −1 0 0
Antistrange s
Third generation
Top t 173210±510 ± 710 1⁄2 +1⁄3 +2⁄3 0 0 0 +1
0 Antitop t
Bottom b 4180±30 1⁄2 +1⁄3 −1⁄3 0 0 0 0 −1
Antibottom b
J = total angular momentum, B = baryon number, Q = electric
charge, I3 = isospin, C = charm, S = strangeness, T = topness, B′
= bottomness.
* Notation such as 173210±510 ± 710 denotes two types of
measurement uncertainty. In the case of the top quark, the first
uncertainty is statistical in nature, and the second is systematic.