Quarkonium

In particle physics, quarkonium (from quark + onium, pl. quarkonia) designates a flavorless meson whose constituents are a quark and its own antiquark. Examples of quarkonia are the J/ψ meson (an example of charmonium, cc) and the ϒ meson (bottomonium, bb). Because of the high mass of the top quark, toponium does not exist, since the top quark decays through the electroweak interaction before a bound state can form. Usually quarkonium refers only to charmonium and bottomonium, and not to any of the lighter quark–antiquark states. This usage is because the lighter quarks (up, down, and strange) are much less massive than the heavier quarks, and so the physical states actually seen in experiments are quantum mechanical mixtures of the light quark states. The much larger mass differences between the charm and bottom quarks and the lighter quarks results in states that are well defined in terms of a quark–antiquark pair of a given flavor.