Hadrons

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= HADRONS! =

Hadron: Composite Particle Made Up Of Quarks
Dictionary definition: Stems from the Greek //hadros// which means 'thick' or 'heavy'; Any of a class of subatomic particles that are composed of quarks and take part in the strong interaction.

According to the Word Encyclopedia 2005, over 150 hadrons have been discovered thus far.

Properties of hadrons: -There are two types of hadrons: baryons and mesons. -Even though quarks have a color charge, there is no net color charge in hadrons (interesting, huh?). -Only a very tiny part of the mass of a hadron is because of the quarks in it. -Hadrons are bound together by strong interactions. -Unlike leptons, hadrons DO have a measurable size. -They have strong interactions because of their substructure, which is color-charged.

Perhaps the most fitting application for the use of hadrons currently is the LHC, or Large Hadron Collider. The photos below show the Large Hadron Collider, located on the border of France and Switzerland. It is a particle accelerator that collides hadrons and basically tries to recreate the environment of the Big Bang to further study things such as the origin of the universe. Photo credit: http://markdowe.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/diagram-of-lhc1.jpg and http://lh4.google.ca/abramsv/R94S7qtLi5I/AAAAAAAALzk/5t3algYTPXk/s1600-h/2046228644_daab5255bd_o.jpg and http://peculiarvelocity.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/hadron.jpg This page was created by Brittany Nicole Truscott Copyright: 2010