Charm quark ($c$)

The charm quark $c$ is the second-generation up-type quark, with electric charge $+2e/3$, spin $1/2$ and baryon number $1/3$. It is heavier than the strange quark and is commonly treated as a heavy quark.^[ref]

A charm–charm antiquark pair supplies the minimal valence content of charmonium, while a charm quark bound with a light antiquark gives an open-charm meson. These systems probe different aspects of quantum chromodynamics: internal heavy-pair motion in the former and heavy–light dynamics in the latter. The approximate flavor classification that includes charm does not make charm and the light quarks equal in mass.

The charm antiquark $\bar{c}$ is the antiparticle of the charm quark. It has electric charge $-2e/3$, baryon number $-1/3$ and the opposite charm flavor number, while retaining spin $1/2$ and the same mass. Its color transformation is the conjugate of a quark's.^[ref]

A charm–anticharm pair has zero net charm and can form charmonium. Zero net charm does not imply absence of charm constituents: it states that quark and antiquark flavor numbers cancel. This distinction is useful when balancing conserved flavor numbers at a strong interaction vertex or classifying a meson's minimal valence content.