Icon class icon_class fas fa-quote-left icon_class_computed fas fa-quote-left Related content An abstract Q(u)ark for M(u)ster M(u)ark Source Wikipedia Copyright information Text from Wikipedia and Wiktionary web pages quoted for educational purposes is subject to the Wikipedia Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike Licence Snippet kind INFO Previous snippet Full quote Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark Next snippet Related snippets A quark is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, which include baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons, or in quark–gluon plasmas. 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 Related snippets (backlinks) 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). Quarks ... are the only known particles whose electric charges are not integer multiples of the elementary charge. There are six types, known as flavors, of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. 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 (such as the electric charge) have equal magnitude but opposite sign. The Standard Model is the theoretical framework describing all the currently known elementary particles. This model contains six flavors of quarks (q), named up (u), down (d), strange (s), charm (c), bottom (b), and top (t). Antiparticles of quarks are called antiquarks, and are denoted by a bar over the symbol for the corresponding quark, such as ū for an up antiquark. 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. Elementary fermions are grouped into three generations, each comprising two leptons and two quarks. Visit also Visit also (backlinks) Flags