Edited by Yujin Tchun
Quarks are fundamental building blocks of matter. Quarks are most commonly found within protons and neutrons, which are the particles that make up the core of every atom in the universe. Basically, the stuff you see around you is made of molecules, molecules are made of atoms, atoms are made up of electrons and the nucleon. The nucleon is made up of neutrons and protons, which are made from quarks. Based on current research and experimental evidence, quarks seem to be truly the fundamental particles, meaning they cannot be split further (Symmetry, 2006).
Protons and neutrons are mostly made up of two different types of quarks, the up quark and the down quark. There are also two copies of each the up and down quarks, they are identical other than their difference in mass. The heavier copies of the up quark are called the charm quark and the top quark, while the heavier copies of the down quark are called the strange quark and the bottom quark (Symmetry, 2006).
New scientific research has led to the discovery of the bottom quark in 1977, where scientists found a hadron (a subatomic particle made up of quarks, gluons and anti-quarks (Byju's, n.d.)) with a mass of about 10 GeV, soon being determined that it was a quark-antiquark bound state of another quark, which was named the bottom quark. But physicists found a problem -- this new quark doublet was seemed to be missing a member. In advance, physicists named this quark the top quark and started a search for this top quark that lasted almost 20 years (Physics Today, 2015).
With the search underway, there were two different experiments at the time, a race of discovering the top quark, the CDF and the D0. Their experiments proved successful as they managed to discover evidence of the top quark. The two collaboration teams scheduled a seminar for March 2nd, and on that day, they officially announced the discovery of the top quark (Physics Today, 2015).
References
Byju's. (n.d.). Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://byjus.com/physics/hadron/
Fermilab [Photograph]. (2020, March 2). Fermilab. https://news.fnal.gov/2020/03/twenty-
fifth-anniversary-of-the-discovery-of-the-top-quark-at-fermilab/
Physics today. (2015, April). Retrieved March 1, 2022, from
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.2749
Symmetry. (2006, March 1). Retrieved March 1, 2022, from
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/march-2006/explain-it-in-60-seconds-
quarks
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