Are there smaller particles than quarks

Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. David Z David Z The elementary fermions matter particles with half integer spin are: Quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. Leptons: electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino. The elementary bosons force carrying particles with integer spin are: Gluon, W and Z, photon. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked Related Grzegorz Wrochna. During the Science Picnic, our visitors could pass their questions to scientists.

Now we ask researchers some of these questions. With the question "What is smaller than a quark? But he adds: "We do not have a theory that would predict that there are any constituents of quarks. There was no need to create such a theory, because so far no physical phenomena have suggested the existence of such constituents" - says the physicist.

According to Prof. Wrochna, a quark can not exist individually. He says that quarks are pieces of a proton or neutron. Barak Schmookler and Dr. Their conclusions were published on February 20 in the journal Nature. The researchers discovered that the speed of a quark depends on the number of protons and neutrons forming short-ranged correlated pairs in an atom's nucleus. The more such pairs there are in a nucleus, the larger the number of slow-moving quarks within the atom's protons and neutrons.

Atoms with larger nuclei intrinsically have more protons and neutrons, so they are more likely to have a higher number of proton-neutron pairs. The team concluded that the larger the atom, the more pairs it is likely to contain.

This results in slower-moving quarks in that particular atom. We know the physical size of some particles, but not the smallest ones.

Some "tiny" particles that people hear about in daily life, such as virus particles, are actually quite large. That means an atomic nucleus is as small to a virus as a virus is to us. So far, scientists have been able to determine that quarks are smaller than that, but not by how much. JoAnna Wendel is a freelance science writer living in Portland, Oregon.

She mainly covers Earth and planetary science but also loves the ocean, invertebrates, lichen and moss. She graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in general sciences because she couldn't decide on her favorite area of science. In her spare time, JoAnna likes to hike, read, paint, do crossword puzzles and hang out with her cat, Pancake. Live Science.