What Is a Hadron?

Quick Answer

A hadron is a subatomic particle made of quarks held together by the strong nuclear force — protons and neutrons are the most familiar examples.

The Full Story

Hadrons are composite particles built from quarks bound by gluons. They come in two families: baryons, made of three quarks (like protons and neutrons), and mesons, made of a quark and an antiquark (like pions). The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is named for the proton beams it accelerates. Quarks come in six flavours — up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. They are never found in isolation due to colour confinement; they are always bound inside hadrons. Exotic hadrons like tetraquarks and pentaquarks have been confirmed at the LHC since 2015.

Key Facts

1.The proton is the most stable hadron — its predicted lifetime exceeds 10 to the 34th power years.

2.Murray Gell-Mann proposed the quark model in 1964 and coined the word quark from James Joyce Finnegans Wake.

3.Neutrons are unstable when free — a lone neutron decays in about 14 minutes.

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