Free quark

A free quark is a hypothetical quark that is not bound to another quark (or, in general, not part of a color-neutral) group. A free quark could be identified by its distinctive fractional electric charge. However, searches for free quarks have consistently come up negative.

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The color force becomes stronger as the distance between quarks grows larger. Eventually the work done separating the quarks becomes enough to create a quark-antiquark pair. These will combine with the original quarks to form two color-neutral groups. So one always finds (when splitting quark groups) a new quark group instead of a free quark. This phenomenon is known as confinement. A hypothetical possible exception is strange matter under special environments in neutron stars.

See also

• Colour confinement