kvarkenes

Kvarkenes are elementary particles and fundamental constituents of matter in the Standard Model of particle physics. They combine to form hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, through the exchange of gluons. Quarks cannot be observed in isolation due to color confinement, a property of quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

There are six flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Each quark carries a fractional electric charge: +2/3e for up-type (up, charm, top) and -1/3e for down-type (down, strange, bottom). Quarks also carry color charge—red, green, or blue—and interact via the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces.

The strong interaction is described by quantum chromodynamics, in which quarks exchange gluons. Quarks are confined within hadrons; at high energies they behave as nearly free particles (asymptotic freedom).

Hadrons are categorized as baryons, composed of three quarks (for example, the proton two up and one down, the neutron two down and one up), or mesons, formed from a quark and an antiquark pair (such as pions and kaons).

Key experimental milestones include deep inelastic scattering experiments in the 1960s that revealed point-like constituents inside nucleons, and subsequent discoveries of the bottom quark in 1977 and the top quark in 1995. The quark model was integrated with the electroweak theory to form the Standard Model.

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