Quarks Essay
Physicists are always looking for particles too small to be seen by the human eye. In one such search 'cosmic' rays were discovered using a cloud chamber experiment. These perviously undetected rays contained many elementary particles. The newly encountered particles were found to combine to make sub-atomic particles, that were later divided into groups classified as bayons, mesons, leptons and bosons. Leptons include the electron and neutrino, bosons include protons and neutrons. Most of the new particles were bosons. The bosons all had similar properties which were grouped into a system called the eightfold way. Physicists began to wonder if the behaviour of these new particles were determined by smaller particles within. These theoretical particles were named quarks. The name quark was a nonsense name taken from a phrase in a book. There are six known types of quarks, called flavours. These flavours are grouped into pairs; up / down, strange/ charmed, top / bottom (sometimes beauty / truth). Each quark also has a corresponding anti-quark. Because the charge of quarks is only a fraction they are never found alone. The first pair
The force that holds quarks have hypothetical charges that hold them together called colour. It is suspected that each quark can have three colours; red, green or blue and the corresponding anti-colour. This colour quantum number then breaks the degeneracy and allows up to three quarks of the same flavor to occupy a single quantum state. Confirmation of the colour concept has been obtained from experiments with election-positron storage rings, and the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), based on this concept, has been developed. Any combination of quarks is called a hadron. A hadron of three quarks is specifically named a baryon, two quarks (a quark and an anti-quark) is called a meson. The properties of quarks are beginning to be better understood but little is known of how they arrange themselves inside hadrons, A common theory is the bag model, it is thought that a hadron is similar to a small bag and the quarks are free within the bag and a force keeps them from straying to far from one another. During nuclear reactions quarks can 'jump' from one bag to another changing on hadron to another, There was a time at the very beginning of the universe, which
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 792
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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