If a paired quark and
antiquark come into contact, they annihilate each other and the flux tube linking them disappears as well.
Physicists have long known that types of quarks and
antiquarks combine in twos and threes to form more-complex particles such as protons and neutrons.
Each quark has an antimatter equivalent known as
antiquark. Quarks usually come in packages of two or three.
Furthermore, pairs of quarks and
antiquarks randomly materialize out of the seeming emptiness of space forming a sea of short-lived particles that interact with the other quarks and gluons already present in baryons and mesons.
The matching of the meson and baryon spectra is thus due to the fact that the same color-confining potential that binds two quarks to a diquark also binds a quark to an
antiquark.
Each quark has an anti-matter equivalent known as
antiquark. Quarks usually come in packages of two or three.
A very important conclusion was arrived from this analysis: baryon asymmetry in new quark sector must exist and has a sign opposite to asymmetry in standard quark sector (quarks U disappear but
antiquarks [bar.U] remain).
Antiquarks have been measured directly in the proton [15, see p.
Until recently, quarks and
antiquarks were observed only in groups of twos or threes.
The strings are converted into valence quarks and
antiquarks. They are subsequently allowed to interact through the ZPC formalism and propagate according to a relativistic transport model [23].
One can show that this colorless state exists for three combinations of quark states only: (1) the quark-antiquark pair with color and anticolor, (2) three quarks, or (3) three
antiquarks, with the appropriate linear combinations of colors or anticolors.
Physicists at a European particle accelerator say they've spotted a never-before-seen elementary particle composed of five of the fundamental constituents known as quarks and
antiquarks. In contrast, protons and neutrons contain three quarks, and no particle is known to have four quarks.