Constructing Quarks

Widely regarded as a classic in its field, Constructing Quarks recounts the history of the post-war conceptual development of elementary-particle physics. Inviting a reappraisal of the status of scientific knowledge, Andrew Pickering suggests that scientists are not mere passive observers and reporters of nature. Rather they are social beings as well as active constructors of natural phenomena who engage in both experimental and theoretical practice. "A prodigious piece of scholarship that I can heartily recommend."—Michael Riordan, New Scientist "An admirable history. . . . Detailed and so accurate."—Hugh N. Pendleton, Physics Today

Explore the history of the discovery and the properties of the quark, one of the most basic constituents of matter.

'Harald Fritzsch and Murray Gell-Mann, the two fathers of quantum chromodynamics, look back at the events that led to the discovery, and eventually acceptance, of quarks as constituent particles ... it is always worthwhile to reminisce about those times when theoretical physicists were truly eclectic, these stories are the testimony of a very active era, in which theoretical and experimental discoveries rapidly chased one another ... Of central importance now is the understanding of the composition of our universe, the dark matter and dark energy, the hierarchy of masses and forces, and a consistent quantum framework of unification of all forces of nature, including gravity. The closing contributions of the book put this venture in the context of today's high-energy physics programme, and make a connection to the most popular ideas in high-energy physics today, including supersymmetry, unification and string theory.'CERN CourierToday it is known that the atomic nuclei are composed of smaller constituents, the quarks. A quark is always bound with two other quarks, forming a baryon or with an antiquark, forming a meson. The quark model was first postulated in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann — who coined the name “quark” from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake — and by George Zweig, who then worked at CERN. In the present theory of strong interactions — Quantum Chromodynamics proposed by H Fritzsch and Gell-Mann in 1972 — the forces that bind the quarks together are due to the exchange of eight gluons.On the 50th anniversary of the quark model, this invaluable volume looks back at the developments and achievements in the elementary particle physics that eventuated from that beautiful model. Written by an international team of distinguished physicists, each of whom have made major developments in the field, the volume provides an essential overview of the present state to the academics and researchers.

A short introduction to elementary particles that discusses the ultimate structure of matter: atoms, the nucleus, protons, neutrons and pions, and quarks.

Understanding the quark structure of matter has been one of the most important advances in contemporary physics. It has unravelled a new and deeper level of structure in matter, and physics at that level reveals a unity and aesthetic simplicity never before attained. All forces emerge from a unique invariance principle and each of the basic interactions results from a specific symmetry property. Quarks interact among themselves through their ?colour?, as now accurately described by quantum chromodynamics.This volume brings together eight major review articles by Maurice Jacob, a physicist at the forefront of research on the quark structure of matter. He has, in particular, been involved with two research topics in this field. The first is the study of hadronic jets, which one actually sees instead of quarks, because of the opacity of the vacuum to colour. The second is the search for quark matter, a new form of matter believed to exist at high temperatures, when the vacuum should become transparent to colour.The papers in this volume provide a comprehensive review of these phenomenological studies on the quark structure of matter, and also a fasinating insight into the pace of recent progress in these areas. The book comes complete with an original introduction by the author, and also contains a pedagogical review on what is a most engrossing and rewarding field of research in physics.

No one has ever seen a quark. Yet physicists seem to know quite a lot about the properties and behavior of these ubiquitous elementary particles. Here a top researcher introduces us to a fascinating but invisible realm that is part of our everyday life. Timothy Smith tells us what we know about quarks--and how we know it. Though the quarks that make science headlines are typically laboratory creations generated under extreme conditions, most quarks occur naturally. They reside in the protons and neutrons that make up almost all of the universe's known matter, from human DNA to distant nebulae, from books and tables to neutron stars. Smith explains what these quarks are, how they act, and why physicists believe in them sight unseen. How do quarks arrange themselves? What other combinations can nature make? How do quarks hold nuclei together? What else is happening in their hidden worlds? It turns out that these questions can be answered using a few simple principles, such as the old standby: opposites attract. With these few principles, Smith shows how quarks dance around each other and explains what physicists mean when they refer to "up" and "down" quarks and talk about a quark's color, flavor, and spin. Smith also explains how we know what we know about these oddly aloof particles, which are eternally confined inside larger particles. He explains how quark experiments are mounted and how massive accelerators, targets, and detectors work together to collect the data that scientists use to infer what quarks are up to. A nonmathematical tour of the quark world, this book is written for students, educators, and all who enjoy scientific exploration--whether they seek a taste of subnuclear physics or just wonder about nature on the smallest of scales.

Ch. 1. Ingredients of the standard model. 1.1. Strong interaction - QCD. 1.2. Electroweak theory. 1.3. CKM mass matrix -- ch. 2. Symmetries and wave functions. 2.1. Why is symmetry important? 2.2. Symmetry current. 2.3. SU(2). 2.4. SU(3). 2.5. Multi-particle states. 2.6. Product-states. 2.7. Quark model wave functions -- ch. 3. Chiral symmetry. 3.1. Lorentz group and chiral fermions. 3.2. Chiral group. 3.3. Spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry -- ch. 4. The sigma model. 4.1. Linear sigma model. 4.2. Non-linear sigma model. 4.3. Fermion field -- ch. 5. Chiral bag model. 5.1. The MIT bag model. 5.2. The little bag model. 5.3. The Skyrme model. 5.4. The chiral bag model. 5.5. Chiral casimir effects. 5.6. The edgehog solution -- ch. 6. Nucleon properties. 6.1. Semiclassical method. 6.2. Isospin rotation of the hedgehog solution. 6.3. Axial properties. 6.4. Non-rigid quantization of the skyrmion. 6.5. Electromagnetic properties. 6.6. Chiral bag with vector mesons -- ch. 7. Large-Nc baryons. 7.1. Introduction. 7.2. General counting rules. 7.3. Counting rules for solitons. 7.4. Large-Nc algebra for baryons. 7.5. Finite Nc. 7.6. Other representations and gA -- ch. 8. Excited baryons. 8.1. Systematics in baryon masses. 8.2. Quarks in a deformed oscillator potential. 8.3. Electromagnetic transitions.

Quarks, Leptons and The Big Bang is a clear, readable and self-contained introduction to particle physics and related areas of cosmology. It bridges the gap between non-technical popular accounts and textbooks for advanced students. The book concentrates on presenting the subject from the modern perspective of quarks, leptons and the forces between them. This book will be of interest to students, teachers and general science readers interested in fundamental ideas of modern physics.

One of the activities of the Ettore Majorana Centre for ,Scientific Culture is the international advanced study courses on scientific topics which are of particular relevance today. The Centre is located in Erice, a mountain town in the province of Trapani in Sicily. At present over seventy Schools of the Centre are active, holding annual or biennial courses, so that about forty courses are organized each year. To date some twenty thou sand participants have attended the courses of the various Schools of the Centre. The International Physics Workshop Series has been established to make the contents of the Workshops o'f great topical interest available to those who were unable to attend them. The courses are conducted on an advanced, post-doctoral level. This volume - the proceedings of the session on "Quarks and Hadronic Structure" - is the first of the Series. In September 1975, thirty-three physicists from twenty-one laboratories in nine countries met in Erice to attend the Workshop. The countries represented were: Austria, France, Germany, India, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The purpose of this Workshop was to bring to gether a group of theorists working on various aspects of the quark structure of hadrons to discuss and critically evaluate the present situation. Professor Morpurgo was given the direction of the Workshop. I would like to take this opportunity to thank him most warmly for having accepted this responsibility and for the success of the Work shop.