• Question: What is the most interesting quark.

    Asked by anon-244701 to Ondrej, Jordan, Ed, Christine, Alice on 9 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Edward Banks

      Edward Banks answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      The top quark is bizarrely huge for an elementary particle. It also has the alternate, archaic name of the ‘Truth’ quark, which is brilliant. Due to its short lifetime, it never forms into larger particles like mesons or baryons.

    • Photo: Ondrej Kovanda

      Ondrej Kovanda answered on 9 Mar 2020:

      The Top quark is the only one we can observe directly. The other quarks (we call them ‘flavours’) combine into hadrons (heavier, composite particles, for instance the proton) very fast after they start to exist (for example as a result of collision in particle collider). The Top, however, is so heavy and thus unstable, that it decays before the hadron formation takes place, and we can study the decay products in our detector.

    • Photo: Jordan McElwee

      Jordan McElwee answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      I like the strange quark. Particles that contain the strange quark were observed to have long lifetimes compared to other particles (though they didn’t know the reason at the time). It was one of the first hints that more was happening inside particles than we realised, which ultimately led to one of the most successful theories in physics – the Standard Model.
      And it was also called the strange quark because it was strange that the particles lasted so long… we’re very imaginative with our names.

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