The quark forces are attractive only in 'colorless' combinations of three quarks (baryons), quark-antiquark pairs (mesons) and possibly larger combinations such as the pentaquark that could also meet the colorless condition. In the pion, an up and an anti-down quark yield a particle of only 139.6 MeV of mass energy, while in the rho vector meson the same combination of quarks has a mass of 770 MeV! The masses of C and S are from Serway, and the T and B masses are from descriptions of the experiments in which they were discovered.Įach of the six 'flavors' of quarks can have three different ' colors'. But in other combinations they contribute different masses. The masses quoted are model dependent, and the mass of the bottom quark is quoted for two different models. These masses represent a strong departure from earlier approaches which treated the masses for the U and D as about 1/3 the mass of a proton, since in the quark model the proton has three quarks. The numbers in the table are very different from numbers previously quoted and are based on the July 2010 summary in Journal of Physics G, Review of Particle Physics, Particle Data Group. The masses must be implied indirectly from scattering experiments. *The masses should not be taken too seriously, because the confinement of quarks implies that we cannot isolate them to measure their masses in a direct way. There was a recent claim of observation of particles with five quarks ( pentaquark), but further experimentation has not borne it out. Quarks are observed to occur only in combinations of two quarks (mesons), three quarks (baryons). The most familiar baryons are the proton and neutron, which are each constructed from up and down quarks.

They can successfully account for all known mesons and baryons (over 200). In the present standard model, there are six 'flavors' of quarks. Quarks and Leptons are the building blocks which build up matter, i.e., they are seen as the 'elementary particles'.

Quark flavours