There are six known "flavors" of quarks. They are up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm. Each of these six quarks has their own specific mass and electrical charge. The most common of these quarks are up and down. They are the lightest and they make up all the matter around us. The next two lightest of the quarks, strange and charm, are found in cosmic rays that originate in space. The two heaviest of the quarks, top and bottom, have not yet been found in nature. Scientist are only able to produce them in the lab. It is believed that the heavier quarks decay to the lighter quarks and that is why we don't see the heaviest in nature.

Each quark has an opposite particle known as an antiquark. These antiquarks combine to form antimatter. This antimatter does not exist in nature on Earth and it is believed that it is very rare in the universe. We know that it does exist for physicists have produced antimatt

So far current theory suggest that there is only six quarks and that they are all fundamental, which means they can not be broken down into smaller particles. Today many scientists around the world are trying to learn more about quarks. They are trying to get a single quark or see if they can make different combinations of quarks. Scientist believe there is a particle known as a leptoquark which contains one lepton and one quark. So far a leptoquark has yet to be found or created. Scientist have yet to discover how the quark gets its mass, but the standard model predicts a particle known as the Higgs boson that would give quarks their mass. The Higgs boson has yet to be detected by scientists in any experiment. Some day, maybe in the near future, scientist will be able to answer all the questions that relate to this fundamental particle, the quark.

Of all the quarks the heaviest of them is the top quark. It is over 30,000 times larger than the up quark. This large mass made it very difficult for scientist to produce in the laboratory. To create this they used a device called a particle accelerator. This machine speed up small particles of matter and collide them with each other. They change their energy of motion into matter. The more massive the object is the more energy is required to produce it. Scientist give particles like quarks, a mass in giga-electron-volts (GeV). The up quark is about 0.005 GeV. The mass of a proton is 1 GeV.

Each quark has been divided into one of three categories called generations. The first generation is the lightest two quarks, second is the next heaviest two, and the third are the heaviest of the quarks. Quarks are different from other elementary particles for they each have a specific electrical charge that is a fraction of the standard charge of charge (e) of one proton. Most other particles have multiples of th

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Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)