A. B. Carleial Consulting

Top Quark

A. B. Carleial (2012)

Todos os direitos reservados pelo autor

O quarque de riba

é um quarque espritado,

pesado danado,

mas curto de vida.

Nunca é confinado

nem hadronizado:

não quer ser colado,

prefere morrer!

Mal surge, e já some!

Decai que nem homem

que deixa de ser!

Do quarque defunto

já nasce outro quarque:

é o quarque de fundo,

ou o estranho, ou o baixo.

E aparece um dáblio,

que é o bóson pesado

de carga +1.

Cad’um p’ro seu lado

sai desembestado –

e fogem dali.

O quarque de riba

não fica no mundo

um yocto-segundo,

mas deixa seu rastro –

retrato espalhado –

p’ra a gente estudar.



A nearly literal English translation of the poem written in colloquial Northeastern Brazilian Portuguese is given below.

Top Quark

The top quark is a frisky quark, heavy as hell, but short-lived.

It is never confined or hadronized: it does not want to be glued, it prefers to die!

As soon as it appears, it disappears!

It decays as a man that ceases to be [a man]!

From the deceased quark another quark is born at once: it is the bottom quark, or the strange one, or the down one.

And a W appears, which is the heavy boson that has charge +1.

Each of them takes off like mad in its own direction – and they flee from there.

The top quark does not stay in the world one yoctosecond, but it leaves its track – a scattered portrait – for us to study.



What is a top quark?

If you studied physics more than twenty-five years ago, you may not be familiar with the top quark, because it was first detected in 1995, although its existence had been predicted in 1973.

The top quark is the heaviest of all known elementary particles, and its behavior is quite unusual and remarkable -- I have tried to describe it in my little poem.

There are six different quarks. The other five quarks are named as follows: down, up, strange, charm, and bottom.

When I was in high school, protons and neutrons were referred to as elementary particles. Now we know that they are not elementary -- each is made up of three quarks that are held together (in "confinement") by gluons.

A proton has two up quarks and one down quark. A neutron has two down quarks and one up quark.

You can read more about the top quark at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_quark