Key facts
- Composition
- elementary particle
- Statistics
- fermionic
- Family
- quark
- Generation
- third
- Interactions
- strong , weak , electromagnetic , gravity
- Symbol
- b
- Antiparticle
- bottom antiquark ( b )
- Theorized
- Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa (1973)
- Discovered
- Leon M. Lederman et al. (1977)
- Mass
- 4.18 +0.04, −0.03 GeV/ c ( MS scheme ) , 4.65 +0.03, −0.03 GeV/ c ( 1S scheme )
- Decays into
- charm quark or, up quark
- Electric charge
- − 1 / 3 e
- Color charge
- yes
- Spin
- 1 / 2 ħ
- Weak isospin
- LH : − + 1 / 2 , RH : 0
- Weak hypercharge
- LH : 1 / 3 , RH : − + 2 / 3
via Wikipedia infobox
~5 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The bottom quark (symbol: b) is an elementary particle of the third generation. It is a heavy quark with a charge of −1/3 e.
All quarks are described in a similar way by electroweak interaction and quantum chromodynamics, but the bottom quark has exceptionally low rates of transition to lower-mass quarks. The bottom quark is also notable because it is a product in almost all top quark decays, and is a frequent decay product of the Higgs boson.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “bottom quark” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.