"Strange quarks" refers to a type of elementary particle that makes up protons, neutrons, and other particles in the nucleus of an atom. These "strange" quarks behave differently from the more common "up" and "down" quarks. They have a higher mass and can change into other types of quarks through a process called "strangeness."
Full definition
«The existence
of strange quark nuggets remains conceivable but not terribly likely,» Witten says.
That's consistent only with
strange quark nuggets, the researchers say; other purported particles, such as miniature black holes, would be too massive and far too rare to spawn two earthquakes in 4 years.
Physicists say proton collisions can result in a large number of particles
containing strange quarks — findings that challenge current theoretical models.
Other physicists suggest that neutron stars may contain hyperons, particles made with heavier quarks known
as strange quarks, not found in normal matter.
By mass, we are made mostly of up and down quarks (and their binding energy),
not strange quarks.
Other physicists, including Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, calculated that
strange quark particles would dash through Earth with dramatic effect: a 1 - ton fleck would unleash the energy of a 50 - kiloton nuclear bomb, spread along its entire threadlike path.
If you broke yourself down, you wouldn't
find strange quarks, only up quarks and down quarks, plus a bunch of leptons and bosons.
A suppression of
strange quark production relative to up and down quark production by a factor of three had previously been noted in experiments at very high energies, such as at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass
of strange quarks.
It determined that neutron stars are most likely composed of ordinary matter and not some exotic form, such
as strange quarks and kaons.
The culprits, they believe, were «
strange quark nuggets» — exotic bits of matter hypothesized to drift through space, but never detected.
If you broke down all matter, the atom or my body, you'd arrive at the same thing: what scientists call one
strange quark, with its half - integer spin.
Strange quarks may exist ephemerally in normal matter, and certainly exist in particle accelerators.
The new particles each contain one charm antiquark and one
strange quark.
The LHCb experiment (shown) has detected five new particles, each composed of two
strange quarks and one charm quark.
Charm and
strange quarks are the third - and fourth-most massive of all quarks.
But in 1984 Ed Witten, the godfather of string theory, proposed that there might be a stable state of matter that consisted in part of a third type of quark, called
a strange quark.
The particles that Skwarnicki and Britton study have two charm quarks and two
strange quarks.
Neutron stars, the remnants of once - massive stars, are thought to contain large numbers of
strange quarks, and antinuclei containing strange quarks could play a part in their evolution.
The other two pairs consist of the charm and
strange quarks, and the top and bottom quarks.
[2] The particle was discovered in the decay chain Bs0 → D0K - π +, where the Bs0, D0, K - and π + mesons contain respectively a bottom anti-quark and
a strange quark, a charm anti-quark and an up quark, an up anti-quark and a strange quark, and a down anti-quark and an up quark.
[1] The Ds3 * (2860) ˉ particle is a meson that contains a charm anti-quark and
a strange quark.
The scientists have often created baryons containing two and even three
strange quarks, but no one had ever detected a baryon containing more than one charm quark, at least no one thought so.
That will allow the team to distinguish between particles known as pions, made of up and down quarks, and kaons, made of
a strange quark with an up or down quark.
Both particles contain one beauty, or b, quark, one
strange quark and one down quark.
The ALICE collaboration notably presented one of the most precise measurements of the lifetime of the hypertriton, an exotic nucleus that contains
a strange quark and is abundantly produced in collisions at the LHC.
Researchers found that when enough energy is provided for a single pair of up, down, or
strange quarks, the new particles are far more likely to be made of the proton's primary quarks (up / anti-up or down / anti-down) than of strange quarks, the next most - prolific quark found in nature.