Hadronization
According to the model of strong interaction , each quark carries one of three color charges red, green, blue. However, as described by confinement , particles with a colored charge do not occur in isolation in nature. Therefore, the colors of the quarks must cancel out so that the composite particle is colorless. There are two possibilities for this composition: Since antiparticles carry anticolor, a color-neutral state can be put together from quark-antiquark systems. However, one color is not enough, since such a state would not be rotationally invariant in the color space. Mesons as a quark-antiquark system are singlets in the color space and as such a superposition of the red-anti-red, blue-anti-blue and green-anti-green states of the quarks involved. The other possibility is the addition of all three colors to colorless, i.e. three quarks of different color charges, which combine to form a baryon . Mesons and baryons are hadrons .
In particle physics, hadronization describes the process in which the quarks bind hadronically and group themselves as described in:
- Mesons (quark-antiquark pair as superposition of the color-anticolor states)
- Baryons (three quarks with three colors red, green, blue).
This happens through the creation of quark-antiquark pairs as soon as the potential energy of the quarks to be separated is sufficiently high. The top quark is special insofar as it has a lifespan of 4.2 · 10 −25 seconds which is too short to have hadronization.