50 YEARS OF QUARKS. Cet article n’est pas disponible.50 YEARS OF QUARKS

Today it is known that the atomic nuclei are composed of smaller constituents, the quarks. A quark is always bound with two other quarks, forming a baryon or with an antiquark, forming a meson. The quark model was first postulated in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann — who coined the name 'quark' from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake — and by George Zweig, who then worked at CERN. In the present theory of strong interactions — Quantum Chromodynamics proposed by H Fritzsch and Gell-Mann in 1972 — the forces that bind the quarks together are due to the exchange of eight gluons.

On the 50th anniversary of the quark model, this invaluable volume looks back at the developments and achievements in the elementary particle physics that eventuated from that beautiful model. Written by an international team of distinguished physicists, each of whom have made major developments in the field, the volume provides an essential overview of the present state to the academics and researchers.

Murray Gell-Mann, the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics. In 1984, he helped establish the Santa Fe Institute, where he now works. A longtime director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Professor Gell-Man served as chairman of its Committee on World Environment and Resources.


Harald Fritzsch holds the chair in theoretical physics at the University of Munich. He is also a regular visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology, the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center of Stanford University. He is the author of many books that have been translated into English, including "The Creation of Matter: The Universe from Beginning to End, Quarks: The Stuff of Matter," and "An Equation That Changed the World: Newton, Einstein, and the Theory of Relativity."