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Unlike leptons, quarks possess color charge, which causes them to engage in the strong interaction. The resulting attraction between different quarks causes the formation of composite particles known as hadrons (see § Strong interaction and color charge below).
Each generation contains two types of leptons and two types of quarks. The two leptons may be classified into one with electric charge −1 (electron-like) and neutral (neutrino); the two quarks may be classified into one with charge − 1 ⁄ 3 (down-type) and one with charge + 2 ⁄ 3 (up-type).
The charged leptons (i.e. the electron, muon, and tau) obtain an effective mass through interaction with the Higgs field, but the neutrinos remain massless. For technical reasons, the masslessness of the neutrinos implies that there is no mixing of the different generations of charged leptons as there is for quarks. The zero mass of neutrino is ...
Half of the fermions are leptons, three of which have an electric charge of −1 e, called the electron (e −), the muon (μ −), and the tau (τ −); the other three leptons are neutrinos (ν e, ν μ, ν τ), which are the only elementary fermions with neither electric nor color charge. The remaining six particles are quarks (discussed below).
The quantum chromodynamics (QCD) sector defines the interactions between quarks and gluons, which is a Yang–Mills gauge theory with SU(3) symmetry, generated by = /. Since leptons do not interact with gluons, they are not affected by this sector.
Under the "quarks and leptons" definition, the elementary and composite particles made of the quarks (in purple) and leptons (in green) would be matter—while the gauge bosons (in red) would not be matter. However, interaction energy inherent to composite particles (for example, gluons involved in neutrons and protons) contribute to the mass ...
The strong attraction between nucleons was the side-effect of a more fundamental force that bound the quarks together into protons and neutrons. The theory of quantum chromodynamics explains that quarks carry what is called a color charge , although it has no relation to visible color. [ 6 ]
The quark–lepton complementarity (QLC) is a possible fundamental symmetry between quarks and leptons. First proposed in 1990 by Foot and Lew, [1] it assumes that leptons as well as quarks come in three "colors". Such theory may reproduce the Standard Model at low energies, and hence quark–lepton symmetry may be realized in nature.