Atomic Exploration: The Ultimate Quarks Quiz

Electron is not a quark flavor. It is a type of lepton, which is a different class of elementary particles.

The strange quark has the strangest behavior among quarks, which is why it is named as such. It decays more slowly than other quarks and leads to interesting particle interactions.

In particle physics, there are six types, or flavors, of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. These quarks differ from one another in their mass and charge characteristics.

The electric charge of an up quark is 2/3​e, where e is the elementary charge. Quarks carry fractional electric charges, and the up quark is one of the two lightest quarks, along with the down quark. The down quark has an electric charge of −1/3e, and together, the up and down quarks combine to form protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei.

Particles made up of quarks are known as hadrons. Hadrons include both mesons and baryons, and they are composite particles composed of quarks held together by the strong force mediated by gluons.

A hadron composed of three quarks is called a baryon. Both the proton and the neutron are examples of baryons, as they consist of three quarks each. The proton is specifically composed of two up quarks and one down quark, while the neutron is made up of two down quarks and one up quark.

The theory that explains the strong interaction between quarks is Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). QCD is a branch of quantum field theory that describes the behavior of quarks and gluons, which are the elementary particles that make up protons, neutrons, and other particles known as hadrons.

The flavor of quark found in the neutron is the down quark. Neutrons are composed of three quarks: one up quark and two down quarks. The combination of quarks in a neutron is (u,d,d), where (u) represents the up quark and (d) represents the down quark. This composition is one of the key aspects of understanding the structure of baryons like neutrons within the framework of the standard model of particle physics.

The quark with the highest mass is the Top quark. The six known quark flavors, in order of increasing mass, are: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. The top quark is significantly heavier than the other quarks, and its mass makes it a key focus of study in high-energy physics experiments.

The down quark is heavier than the up quark. The mass of an up quark is around approximately 2 MeV (Mega electron-volts), while the mass of a down quark is closer to 5 MeV.