Kvarkar – Quarks

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Quarks Are the Building Blocks of All Matter

Quark are the fundamental constituents of all matter, but don't seem to have any structure and appear to be indivisible. BLACKJACK3D/GETTY IMAGES

Protons and neutrons, the particles that form the nuclei of atoms, might seem to be really tiny. But scientists say that those subatomic particles themselves are made up of something even smaller — particles called quarks.

"Well, I think the simplest way of stating it is that quarks are the fundamental constituent of matter, of all the stuff that's around us," explains Geoffrey West. He's a theoretical physicist who founded the high energy physics group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now is Shannan Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. (He's also author of the 2017 bestseller "Scale," about how the mathematical laws governing the structure and growth of the physical world apply to biological life and to human society.)

Like electrons and other leptons, quarks don't seem to have any structure and appear to be indivisible, as explained by University of Melbourne particle physicist Takaski Kubota in The Conversation.

Quarks are so tiny that it's mind-boggling to even try to express their estimated size. University College London physics professor Jon Butterworth explained that the radius of a quark is roughly 2,000 times smaller than that of a proton, which in turn is 2.4 trillion times as small as a grain of sand.

Existence of Quarks First Proposed in 1964

The existence of quarks was first proposed in 1964 by California Institute of Technology theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann, one of the key figures in the development of the Standard Model of particle physics. Gell-Mann, winner of the of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics, figured out that explaining the properties of protons and neutrons required that they be made up of smaller particles. At the same time, another CalTech physicist, Georg Zweig, also independently came up with the idea as well.

The existence of quarks was confirmed by experiments conducted from 1967 to 1973 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

One of the odd things about quarks, as West explains, is that they can be observed, but they can't be isolated. "There's a subtle difference," he says. "They're like electrons in that electrons are fundamental, but with electrons we can observe and also isolate them. You can point to an electron. With quarks, you can't take one out of the nucleus and put it on the table and examine it."

Instead, by using gigantic particle accelerators, scientists speed up electrons and use them to probe the depth of the nucleus. If they go deep enough within, the electrons will scatter off the quarks, which can be measured using very sophisticated detectors. "We reconstruct what's in the target that protons and neutrons are made up of," West says. "You see these little point objects that we identify as quarks."

There Are Six Types of Quarks

Quarks have fractional charges compared to the protons that they form. There are six types of quarks based upon mass, and the particles also have a quality called color, which a way of describing how the strong force holds them together. Color is carried by gluons — a sort of messenger for the strong force that bind quarks together. (They're analogous to photons.)

A team of University of Kansas physicists plan to use a device installed at the Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator located in a 17-mile (27-kilometer) tunnel between France and Switzerland, to investigate the strong interaction between quarks and gluons.

"The idea is to get a better understanding of the proton and the heavy ion structure — such as Lead for instance — and to study a new phenomenon called saturation," Christophe Royon, a University of Kansas physics professor who is leading the research, explains in an email. "When two proton or two ions collide at very high energy, we are sensitive to their substructure — quarks and gluons — and we can probe some region where the density of gluons gets very large."