Quarks And You: The Molecular T-Shirt Mystery

do your molecules have quarks t shirt

The Do your molecules have quarks? T-shirt is a fun play on words, combining a romantic pick-up line with a scientific fact. Quarks are a type of elementary particle and a fundamental building block of matter. They combine to form composite particles called hadrons, which include protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly observable matter is made up of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons. The T-shirt is a light-hearted way to spark interest in science and can be a great conversation starter for anyone who wears it. It is also a reminder that science can be found in unexpected places, even in the fabric of a T-shirt!

Characteristics Values
Material 100% organic cotton
Color Pink coral
Description "This T-Shirt is made of 9 million billion billion quarks"

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Quarks are elementary particles

Quarks are the basic building blocks of protons and neutrons, which in turn are the building blocks of atomic nuclei. Protons are made of two up quarks and one down quark, while neutrons contain two down quarks and one up quark. These up and down quarks are the lightest varieties and the most common in the universe.

Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, color charge, and spin. They are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces: electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction, and weak interaction.

There are six types, or "flavors", of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Up-type quarks (up, charm, and top) have a positive fractional electric charge, while down-type quarks (down, strange, and bottom) have a negative fractional electric charge. Quarks are never found in isolation due to a phenomenon known as color confinement; they can only be found within hadrons or in quark-gluon plasmas.

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Quarks are a fundamental constituent of matter

Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, colour charge, and spin. They are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces: electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction, and weak interaction. Quarks are also the only known particles whose electric charges are not integer multiples of the elementary charge.

There are six types, or flavours, of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Up and down quarks have the lowest masses of all quarks. The heavier quarks rapidly change into up and down quarks through a process of particle decay. Up and down quarks are generally stable and the most common in the universe, whereas strange, charm, bottom, and top quarks can only be produced in high-energy collisions, such as those involving cosmic rays and particle accelerators.

Quarks were first proposed in 1963 by American physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, who originally identified three types, or flavours, of quarks: up, down, and strange. The existence of quarks was supported by experiments at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in 1967, which showed that there were three point-like charges inside the proton.

Quarks are never found in isolation due to a phenomenon known as colour confinement. They can only be found within hadrons, which include baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons, or in quark-gluon plasmas. This means that much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of hadrons.

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Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons

Quarks are a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. They are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, which in turn are the building blocks of atomic nuclei. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons. All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons.

Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, colour charge, and spin. They are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction, and weak interaction). Quarks are also the only known particles whose electric charges are not integer multiples of the elementary charge.

There are six types of quarks, known as flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Up and down quarks have the lowest masses of all quarks. The heavier quarks rapidly change into up and down quarks through a process of particle decay. Because of this, up and down quarks are generally stable and the most common in the universe.

Quarks can have a positive or negative electric charge (like protons and electrons). They also have three additional states of charge: positive and negative redness, greenness, and blueness. These so-called colour charges are just names—they are not related to actual colours. The force that connects positive and negative colour charges is called the strong nuclear force. This strong nuclear force is the most powerful force involved with holding matter together. It is much stronger than the three other fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak nuclear force.

Quarks and antiquarks only occur bound together inside hadrons; they have never been observed in isolation. A hadron can consist of three quarks (in which case it is called a baryon), three antiquarks (in which case it is called an antibaryon), or one quark and one antiquark (in which case it is called a meson).

The most common baryons are the proton and the neutron, the building blocks of the atomic nucleus. A great number of hadrons are known, most of them differentiated by their quark content and the properties these constituent quarks confer.

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Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, colour charge and spin

Quarks are a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. They have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, colour charge and spin.

Quarks are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces: electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction and weak interaction. They are also the only known particles whose electric charges are not integer multiples of the elementary charge.

Quarks have fractional electric charge values – either (−2/3) or (+2/3) times the elementary charge (e). Up, charm and top quarks (collectively referred to as up-type quarks) have a charge of +2/3 e; down, strange and bottom quarks (down-type quarks) have a charge of −1/3 e. Antiquarks have the opposite charge to their corresponding quarks.

Quarks possess colour charge, which causes them to engage in the strong interaction. There are three types of colour charge: blue, green and red. Each of these is complemented by an anticolour: antiblue, antigreen and antired. The attraction between different quarks, mediated by gluons, causes the formation of composite particles known as hadrons.

Spin is an intrinsic property of elementary particles. It is sometimes visualised as the rotation of an object around its own axis, though this notion is somewhat misguided at subatomic scales because elementary particles are believed to be point-like. For quarks, a measurement of the spin vector component along any axis can only yield the values +1/2 or −1/2.

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Quarks are never found in isolation

Quarks are a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. They combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, which are the components of atomic nuclei. All commonly observable matter is composed of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons.

Quarks have various intrinsic properties, including electric charge, mass, colour charge, and spin. They are the only elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction, and weak interaction).

The strong interaction between quarks is mediated by gluons, massless vector gauge bosons. Each gluon carries one colour charge and one anticolour charge. Gluons are constantly exchanged between quarks through a virtual emission and absorption process. When a gluon is transferred between quarks, a colour change occurs in both. For example, if a red quark emits a red-antigreen gluon, it becomes green, and if a green quark absorbs a red-antigreen gluon, it becomes red.

As the distance between quarks increases, the binding force strengthens. The colour field becomes stressed, much like an elastic band, and more gluons of appropriate colour are spontaneously created to strengthen the field. Above a certain energy threshold, pairs of quarks and antiquarks are created, binding with the quarks being separated and forming new hadrons. This phenomenon is known as colour confinement.

While the process of quark flavour transformation is the same for all quarks, each quark has a preference for transforming into the quark of its own generation. The relative tendencies of all flavour transformations are described by a mathematical table called the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix (CKM matrix).

Frequently asked questions

The t-shirt is made of 100% organic cotton.

The t-shirt comes in pink coral and aquamarine.

The t-shirt comes in both women's and men's sizes.

You can buy the t-shirt from the CERN Science Gateway website.

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