quark
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: enpr: kwäk
ipa: /kwɑːk/
enpr: kwärk
ipa: /kwɑɹk/
enpr: kwôrk
ipa: /kwɔɹk/
rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)k
rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)k
Forms: form: quarks
Etymology: Sense 1 (“subatomic particle”) was coined by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) in 1963, apparently an arbitrary word. Subsequently, in a letter dated 27 June 1978 to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement, Gell-Mann associated the word with the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) and indicated that he pronounced the word /kwɔɹk/, reasoning that the sentence referred to a call in a pub for “three quarts”. However, the context in the book indicates that quark is probably a variant of quawk (“harsh call of a bird”) and was intended by Joyce to be pronounced /kwɑːk/, the modern pronunciation.
Senses: examples: text: A simpler and more elegant scheme can be constructed if we allow non-integral values for the charges. We can dispense entirely with the basic baryon b if we assign to the triplet t the following properties: spin #92;frac#123;1#125;#123;2#125;, z#61;#123;-#92;frac#123;1#125;#123;3
ref: 1964 February 1, M[urray] Gell-Mann, “A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons”, in Physics Letters, volume 8, number 3, Amsterdam, North Holland: North-Holland Publishing Company, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 23 Jun 2022, page 214, column 2:
text: There are six known quarks in nature, the up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and the top quark. The quarks are arranged in three pairs or "generations". Each member of a pair may be transformed into its partner via the charged-current weak interaction. Together with the six known leptons (the electron, muon, tau, and their associated neutrinos), the six quarks constitute all of the known luminous matter in the universe. The understanding of the properties of the quarks and leptons and their interactions is therefore of paramount importance.
ref: 2006 December, Arnuf Quadt, “Top Quark Physics at Hadron Colliders”, in The European Physical Journal C: Particles and Fields, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg: Springer, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 835, column 1; republished as Douglas H. Beck, Dieter Haidt, John W[illiam] Negele, editors, Top Quark Physics at Hadron Colliders (Advances in the Physics of Particles and Nuclei; 28), Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer, 2007, →ISBN, page 1:
text: There were also particles no one had predicted that just appeared. Five of them are of interest to me here. In order of increasing modernity, they are the neutrino, the pi meson, the antiproton, the quark and the Higgs boson. […] It fairly rapidly became clear to physicists that free quarks were not going to be found. Making a virtue out of necessity, they invented a dynamics that would permanently confine quarks within particles. In this scenario quarks exchange particles called gluons. […] There is no escape. Quarks are imprisoned forever.
ref: 2012 March-April, Jeremy Bernstein, “A Palette of Particles”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 2, New Haven, Conn.: Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 12 Apr 2023, page 146:
topics: natural-sciences
physical-sciences
physics
synonyms: ace
glosses: In the Standard Model, one of a number of elementary subatomic particles having fractional electric charge that forms matter. They are theorized not to exist in isolation, but only in combinations in hadrons such as neutrons and protons or in quark–gluon plasmas.
examples: text: Two functions are provided to convert between strings and quarks: XrmStringToQuark and XrmQuarkToString […] The second takes a quark as its parameter and returns a pointer to its associated string; it is used primarily for debugging and runtime error messages.
ref: 1992, Keith D. Gregory, “Resources Revisited”, in Programming with Motif, New York, N.Y.: Springer-Verlag New York, →DOI, →ISBN, page 453:
topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
qualifier: X Window System
coordinate_terms: atom
glosses: An integer that uniquely identifies a text string.
topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
qualifier: X Window System
glosses: A nonsense, trivial text string.
Synonyms: word: quark
Hypernyms: word: fermion
word: elementary particle
word: subatomic particle
Hyponyms: anti-beauty quark
anti-bottom quark
anti-charm quark
anti-down quark
anti-strange quark
anti-top quark
anti-up quark
beauty quark
bottom quark
charm quark
down quark
strange quark
top quark
truth quark
up quark
Derived terms: antiquark
biquark
charmed quark
diquark
hexaquark
interquark
multiquark
pentaquark
prequark
quagma
quark-antiquark
quark-gluon plasma
quarkless
quark matter
quark model
quark nova
quark nugget
quarkonic
quarkonium
quark star
quark theory
quarkyonic
quink
sea quark
squark
strange quark matter
strange quark star
subquark
techniquark
tetraquark
triquark