The quark model
Modelo de quarks
- Date
- 1964 · confidence high
- Place
- Caltech, Pasadena, United States / CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
- Credited to
- Murray Gell-Mann; George Zweig
- People
- 👤 George Zweig1937–👤 Murray Gell-Mann1929–2019
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
Hundreds of hadrons are explained as combinations of three constituents with fractional charge (up, down, strange), organised by the SU(3) symmetry of the 'eightfold way'. The discovery of the predicted Omega-minus particle (Brookhaven, 1964) confirms the scheme.
Zweig independently proposed 'aces' at CERN and his paper was blocked; Gell-Mann took 'quark' from Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
What it led to
- Quantum chromodynamics and colour
- Discovery of the charm, bottom and top quarks
- Standard model
- Hadron physics and quark-gluon plasma
Built on
- Eightfold Way (Gell-Mann, Ne'eman, 1961)
- The 1950s particle zoo
- Sakata model