What is quarks flavor?
Flavor is the name scientists give to different versions of the same type of particle. For instance, quarks (which make up the protons and neutrons inside atoms) come in six flavors: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm.
Why are they called flavors of quarks?
The names given to the different flavors of quarks are arbitrary. There is no particular reason for these names, and most scientists just use symbols such as ‘u’ for up quarks and ‘d’ for down quarks. Scientists first discovered two quarks with different electric charges and named them up and down.
Why do we need flavors and colors for quarks?
Flavor characterizes the weak interactions of the quarks. Color the strong ones. The “flavor” is the type of quark, like up or down. “Color” is a characteristic property, somehow similar to electric charge just that it can have three values and not just two.
Why do quarks change flavor?
In particular, the action of the weak force is such that it allows the conversion of quantum numbers describing mass and electric charge of both quarks and leptons from one discrete type to another. This is known as a flavour change, or flavour transmutation.
What is a flavour in physics?
flavour, also spelled flavor, in particle physics, property that distinguishes different members in the two groups of basic building blocks of matter, the quarks and the leptons.
How do quarks change flavor?
Flavour can change in particle reactions only through the agency of the weak force, as when, for example, a muon changes into an electron or a neutron (containing two down quarks and one up quark) transmutes into a proton (made from two up quarks and one down quark).
What do the colors of quarks represent?
The colours red, green, and blue are ascribed to quarks, and their opposites, antired, antigreen, and antiblue, are ascribed to antiquarks. According to QCD, all combinations of quarks must contain mixtures of these imaginary colours that cancel out one another, with the resulting particle having no net colour.
Can strong force change quark flavour?
That means also that any other form of interaction (strong, electromagnetic, neutral weak, or gravitative) does not change the flavor (masses) of given quarks (but could at most create or annihilate quark anti-quark pairs; leaving the number of quarks per species constant).