QUARKS AND GLUONS: THE BASIC BUILDING BLOCKS OF MATTER

Yogesh Mathur

Our journey in search of the origin of matter and, by extension, the origin of the Universe itself-has taken us deeper and deeper inside the atoms. First to come into view was the atomic nucleus, and still further downscale, the protons and neutrons that constitute the nucleus. At least for three decades, nucleons (protons and neutrons) were considered to be our final destination. Then peering into them we detected shadows of yet another layer of matter that lurks inside. Unable so far to crack open a nucleon and bring out one of these shadowy objects for observation and measurement, we can only guess what they are. We have named them Quarks. We believe that two types of quarks namely, u (up) and d (down) make up a proton and the neutron. Quarks are held together by a force dubbed the chromo force, represented by particles named Gluons, which are just as unseen as quarks. So it is quarks and gluons that lie on the bottom of all matter. It seems worth mentioning here that gluon, just like photon is a mass less particle. Gluon is spin 1 particle. Quarks (q) were first proposed by Gell-Mann and Zweig (more than four decades ago) as basic building blocks of the matter. Quarks are fermions, i.e. have spin . (Other properties of quarks are listed in Table 1). Quarks are characterized by their flavors (a quantum number). The discovery of the flavor degree of freedom led to the concept that quarks are the basic fundamental particles out of which almost all other particles can be built up. Up to the present time, quarks with six different flavors are known to exist. They are denoted by u (up quark), d (down quark), s (strange quark), c (charm quark), t (top quark) and b (bottom quark). In the unification scheme of quarks and leptons there are three generations of elementary particles. ( l=electron and electron neutrino, muon and muon neutrino, lepton and its neutrino). Quark doublet (u,d) and lepton doublet (v e , e ) form the first generation of elementary particles, quark doublet (c,s) and lepton doublet (v , ) form the second generation of elementary particles and quark doublet (t,b) and lepton doublet form the third generation of elementary particles. Quarks u d c s t b Q 2/3 -1/3 2/3 -1/3 2/3 -1/3 Iz - 0 0 0 0 C 0 0 1 0 0 0 S 0 0 0 -1 0 0 T 0 0 0 0 1 0 B 0 0 0 0 0 -1 Mass (Mev) 5.6 1.1 9.9 1.1 1350 50 199 33 >90000 5000

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Table 1 :Properties of quarks. Q is the electric charge, Iz is the z component of Iso-spin, C is the charm quantum number, T is the topness, B is the bottomness. Each quark carries a baryon number 1/3 and a color. There are three different colors a quark can carry. The interaction between the quarks depends on the color of interacting quarks, similar to the interaction between electric charges. For this reason the color of the quark is sometimes called its Color Charge. By the exchange of a gluon, a quark with one color can interact with another quark with any other color. In a quarkanti-quark interaction, a particle with three types of color charges interacts with another particle with three types of color charges. There are in principle, nine possible types of gluons (one belonging to a color singlet state and remaining eight belonging to a color octet). However, the gluon in a singlet state would not carry color charge and therefore, would be colorless. A colorless and massless gluon will lead to a long range interaction between colorless hadron states. The existence of a color singlet gluon is, however, ruled out by the absence of this long range color interaction between color singlet hadrons. There are thus, only eight gluons as members of the color octet all of which carry color charges. In quark models, mesons (one of the elementary particles) can be described as quark-anti-quark bound state. The baryons can be considered as three quark bound states. Up to now, it is found that all hadronic states which can be observed are color singlet states which are completely anti-symmetric with respect to the exchange of any two quarks of hadron. Experimentally, no single quark, which is described by a color triplet state, has ever been isolated. Therefore, it is held that only hadrons in the color singlet state can be isolated and observed. The absence of observation of a single quark in isolation also suggests that the interaction between quarks and gluons must be strong on the large distance scales. During the past two decades or so Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD), the theory of colored quarks and gluons, has emerged as a leading contender for the theory of strong interaction and the predictions of the theory have been tested in a variety of elementary particle reactions at large momentum transfer. QCD exhibits two remarkable features, namely Asymptotic Freedom (AF) and Quark Confinement. Asymptotic Freedom implies that quark and gluons at high energies are weakly interacting whereas the Quark Confinement tells us that the color interactions at small distances become stronger. This is basically the reason for non-observation of a single isolated quark in the nature. Note that this case is just opposite to the interaction between two electric charges which is governed by the Coulombs Law and increases with the decrease in the distance between the charges.

Quark Confinement and the Bag Model of a Hadron

With quarks being confined inside a hadron, a useful phenomenological description of quarks in hadron is provided by the so-called bag model. While there are different versions of the model, MIT bag model contains the essential characteristics of the phenomenology of quark confinement. In the MIT bag model the quarks are treated as massless particles inside a bag of finite dimension and are infinitely massive outside the bag. Confinement in the model is a result of the balance of the bag pressure which is directed inward and the

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stress arising from the kinetic energy of quarks. In this description, the total color charge of the matter inside the bag must be colorless by the virtue of the Gauss law. As three different types of colors, the bag model would imply that the allowable hadronic bag should include colorless qqq (baryonic) and q (mesonic) states. Physics has come a long way since quarks were first postulated as basic building blocks of matter nearly four decades ago. Quarks have never been detected as such, but their color and flavour signatures have been firmly established. Their invisibility has been turned around as a signature of a relatively new principle in physics, viz., confinement a property expected to be possessed by certain types of gauge fields. In association with leptons, quarks are the nearest candidates for elementary particle status, whose interactions (strong and electro-weak) are believed to be governed by gauge principle and strong interactions are described by QCD. Unfortunately, QCD has not yet established confinement within its own framework, causing the principle to be more believed than formally proved. On the other hand, the analysis of strongly interacting matter, based on QCD as underlying dynamics, constitutes as one of the fundamental challenges of present day physics. QCD predicts that at high enough temperature (or ) and /or high density (fm/nucleon) the strongly interacting matter should undergo a phase transition to an entirely new state, a plasma of de-confined quarks and gluons. As experimental test of large scale features of QCD is, therefore, of basic importance because it can throw light on the issue of quark confinement. Phase transitions in QCD at high enough temperature are also very useful in the cosmological studies, because if such a phase transition occurs, it would have occurred in the Universe (in the reverse direction i.e. from deconfined state to a confined state)

References
1. 2. 3. T. Muta, Foundations of Quantum Chromo-dynamics,, world Scientific, Singapore, (1987) S.K.Karn, R.S.Kaushal, Y.K.Mathur Euro. Phys. Jour. C14, 487 (2000) R.Ramanathan, Y.K.Mathur, K.K.Gupta, Agam K. Jha Phys.Rev.C70 (2004)

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