flavor

flavour (US), flavor

Physics a property of quarks that enables them to be differentiated into six types: up, down, strange, charm, bottom (or beauty), and top (or truth)

---

flavor [′flā·vər]

(food engineering)

The set of characteristics of a food that causes a simultaneous reaction or sensation of taste on the tongue and odor in the olfactory center in the nose.

(particle physics)

A label used to distinguish different types of leptons (the electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, and possibly others) and different color triplets of quarks (the up, down, strange, and charmed quarks, and possibly others).

---

Flavor

Any of the six different varieties of quarks. All hadronic matter is composed of quarks, the most elementary constituents of matter. The six different flavors are labeled u, d, s, c, b, and t, corresponding to up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top. Quarks are all spin-¹/₂ fermions. The u, c, and t flavors carry a positive electric charge equal in magnitude to two-thirds that of the electron; the d, s, and b flavors have a negative charge one-third that of the electron. Different flavored quarks have vastly different masses ranging from the lightest, the u quark, with a mass around 5 MeV/c² (where c is the speed of light), equal to the mass of about 10 electrons, to the top quark, with a mass 35,000 times greater, or 175 GeV/c², about the mass of a gold atom. Quarks of any flavor are further characterized by three additional quantum numbers called color: red, green, and blue. Each quark has an antiquark counterpart carrying the corresponding anticolor. See Antimatter, Color (quantum mechanics), Elementary particle, Quarks

---

(spelling)

flavor - US spelling of "flavour".