Antiquarkët

Antiquarkët is the plural Albanian terminology for antiquarks, which are the antiparticles of quarks, fundamental constituents of matter in the Standard Model of particle physics. An antiquark has the same mass as its corresponding quark but opposite electric charge, colour charge, and other quantum numbers. This opposite character enables antiquarks to participate in strong and weak interactions with regular quarks while preventing direct electromagnetic attraction. The concept of antiquarks was first introduced in the early 1960s to explain the observed resonance states in high‑energy hadron collisions and was mathematically formalised within the quark model of Gell‑Mann and Zweig.

In particle accelerators such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, antiquarks are produced alongside quarks during high‑energy collisions. They immediately combine with other antiquarks or quarks to form hadrons. Because antiquarks are unstable, they decay via weak interactions into lighter particles within fractions of a second, producing mesons, baryons or leptons. The study of antiquark interactions is essential for understanding charge‑parity (CP) violation, the baryon asymmetry of the Universe, and the behaviour of quark‑gluon plasma in heavy‑ion collisions.

Research on antiquarks has also contributed to searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, including investigations of hypothetical particles such as top‑quarks and exotic hadrons containing multiple heavy flavours. The properties of antiquarks are experimentally accessed through detectors that measure the trajectories and energy deposits of their decay products.