Tevatron Collider Events - A high-energy photon (red tower) and a shower of particles (pink tracks) materialized from a quark, observed in the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). A quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. There are six types of quarks, known as flavors: up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. Up and down quarks have the lowest masses of all quarks. The heavier quarks rapidly change into up and down quarks through a process of particle decay: the transformation from a higher mass state to a lower mass state. Because of this, up and down quarks are generally stable and the most common in the universe, whereas strange, charm, bottom, and top quarks can only be produced in high energy collisions.