Quarks pointlike at smallest scale measured

17 Jun 2002

Quarks, along with leptons, are the most elementary things in the universe, as far as experiments can tell. The latest word on the situation, as reported now by Fermilab scientists, is that quarks do not have any apparent structure.

One way of expressing this is to say that if objects are hiding inside quarks, their energy would have to be greater than about 1.6 TeV. A still more dramatic way of registering this null result is to say that having trained their microscope on quarks, the Fermilab scientists see no objects at the smallest distance scale inside quarks explored Experiments, such as those that search for proton decay, have in effect probed even finer distance scales without finding "subquark" materials.