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Now that we know about quarks and their properties, we can understand the composite particles they form. Any particle made of quarks is called a hadron. Hadrons experience the strong nuclear force (unlike leptons, which do not). There are two types of hadrons: baryons (made of three quarks) and mesons (made of a quark and an antiquark).
A baryon is a hadron composed of three quarks (qqq). The most familiar baryons are the proton and the neutron.
Every quark has a baryon number of +1/3, so a baryon (three quarks) has a total baryon number of +1. Antibaryons (three antiquarks) have baryon number −1. Baryon number is conserved in all particle interactions.
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