Definition of top quark in English:

top quark

(also t)


  • A quark with a mass of about 340,000 times that of an electron and a charge of +2/3.

    • ‘These include the charm and top quarks, which are heavy copies of the up quark, and the strange and bottom quarks, which are heavy copies of the down quark.’
    • ‘Male African elephants and the smallest species of ant differ in mass by more than 11 orders of magnitude - roughly the same span as the top quark and the neutrino.’
    • ‘My key predictions of the top quark mass and the Higgs boson mass (still unknown) even appeared in the pages of Nature, the most prestigious refereed science journal in the world.’
    • ‘I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered.’
    • ‘In our quest to understand the nature of the weak force, physicists have come up with some theories that link the weak force's extremely heavy W-boson with the extremely heavy top quark.’
    • ‘Thus, Nature hides its fundamental particles and we would like to understand better how the Strong Force achieves this. - Only the mass of the top quark is accurately known, because QCD effects are small for such a heavy particle.’
    • ‘String theory claims that all particles - everything from electrons to exotic particles like the top quark - are made up of something smaller, something which may possibly be the essence of everything.’
    • ‘Therefore the Higgs particle cannot be much heavier than the top quark (which has a mass of 174.3 5.1 GeV).’
    • ‘They were part of an international team at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago that established the mass of the top quark, a discovery that ranked as Discover's No. 57 story.’
    • ‘Besides the Higgs and supersymmetry, ATLAS and CMS will also measure various properties of the top quark and explore the strong interaction at 14 TeV.’