The Search for Quark :: essays research papers

What exactly is Quark? Quark: a fermion which is believed to be one of the fundamental constituents of matter. All quarks have a fractional electric charge1. This pretty much means quarks have  ½ spin (rotate two full rotations to get to place it started), apply to Pauli Exclusion Principle, is one of the things that make up all matter, and its electric charge is a fraction. There are three different colors of quark; red, green, and blue. The colors always up to white. Also there are three different kinds of antiquark; cyan, yellow, and magenta. Quarks are at least 330MeV. Quarks were first proposed in 1964. It was named quark by Caltech theorist Murray Gell-Mann. He named them that from a quotation in a novel â€Å"Three quarks for Muster Mark, Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark †¦Ã¢â‚¬ 2 Gell-Mann said all mesons, baryons, and hadrons are made of quarks. He also said they are made of three types of quarks (up, down, and strange). That makes a total of nine types of quarks. George Zweig called them aces. Not many people believed in it at this time. From 1968 to 1973 MIT bombarded protons and neutrons with electrons. Electrons ricocheted off protons and neutrons as if it hit a hard, tiny object. The hard object was a quark. Over the years experiments and researches have led to a lot of indirect evidence that quarks exist. Despite all this indirect evidence they could not find a single free quark. No particle detector detected one. This led to a lot of non believers. As more proof has been shown that quarks exist it became more popular and less doubted. Chapter 1: Over coming Skepticism   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Doubters did not believe in quarks. They thought of quarks just as a math equation that could explain a couple of things. They had good reason. The quark was never found free or even revealed itself. That was until 1974 when two discoveries occurred at the Brookhaven Laboratory and Stanford. They had found a new particle. Stanford called it the psi and Brookhaven called it the J. The new particle had to be a new kind of quark. Two years later Harvard theorist Sheldon Glashow named the new particle the charmed quark. This discovery shattered any doubts about the quark being real or not.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The discovery also shattered the bootstrap model theory. This theory said that protons, neutrons, and other particles were the smallest units.