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Merla's Cosmatron, according to a Voltron episode I've seen is a machine that uses charmed quarks to send a person into another dimension called Infinity. It is a dimension of sight, sound, and pain. Allura and Zarkon's servant Cassack have been to the dimension Infinity because of the Cosmatron. A more detailed explanation of what quarks are would further explain the workings of the Cosmatron.
During the episode, Merla explained that there are six kinds of quarks (otherwise known as "flavors"): Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange, and Charmed (her favorite are Charmed quarks). According to sources such as "Subatomic Particles: The Standard Model" those are the six kind of quarks except that the one called "Charmed" is really just called "Charm." Although I have read a source that showed that Charm quarks are also correctly referred to as Charmed quarks, Charm quarks appears to be the much more often used term. Contrary to the six quarks Merla identified, according to a published essay by Charles Panati "Nature's Building Blocks: Stalking the Quark" in The Norton Sampler: Third Edition, the six quarks are Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Truth, and Beauty. Before I explain how both sources of information are correct, I'll quote some other interesting information from the essay. "Quarks are colored, figuratively speaking, red, blue, and yellow, so that certain assortments yield tan gossamerlike neutrinos, and other combinations yield neutral-colored stable particles." And, the following is more interesting information I'll quote from the same essay. "Two physicists at the University of Chicago have even suggested that certain combinations of quarks could be manipulated to form stable and very strange gases. What they are labeling 'Beauty-Up' gas and 'Anti-Beauty [Ugly]-Up' gas could, supposedly, be safely stored in containers, and minuscule quanities could form a veritable power plant, since mixing just two molecules would result in their annihilation into ten billion volts of pure energy. In their technical report the physicists write: 'Stable quarks would, therefore, offer the possibility of storing very high useable energies within small volumes. The technological possibilities are self evident.'"
Now as for how it is possible for the six "flavours" of quarks to be Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Top, Bottom, Truth, and Beauty, the answer is explained in the Encyclopedia.com at http://www.encyclopedia.com/searchpool.asp?target=@DOCTITLE%20elementary%20particles . The answer is that the quark Top is the same as the quark Truth and the quark Bottom is the same as the quark Beauty. From what I've read it seems that the names Top and Bottom are more commonly used than the names Truth and Beauty. Also, I have never seen the pairs mixed such as to list Top and Beauty or Truth and Bottom together.
Contrary to the information that there are only 6 quarks, the Encyclopedia.com (see link in previous paragraph) states that there are 12 quarks: Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Top(or Truth), and Bottom(or Beauty) and their antiparticles. These 6 antiparticles would be Anti-Up, Anti-Down, Anti-Strange, Anti-Charm, Anti-Top(or Anti-Truth), and Anti-Bottom (or Anti-Beauty). Plus a new flavour has been created called strangness! Detail about this can be found at http://physicsweb.org/article/world/13/10/9/1 in the second paragraph under the heading "Where and how to find free quarks" in the article "A strange quark plasma" by Emanuele Quercigh and Johann Rafelski.
Some More Interesting Quark Facts:The following information is based on the article "Subatomic Particles: The Standard Model"
Not eveything is made up of quarks! Leptons are elementary particles that are not made up of quarks, but like quarks they have antiparticles (there are also six kinds of leptons and four of them are electron, muon, tau, and neutrinos). Also Bosons are not made of quarks or leptons. Bosons are "force carriers", and the exchange of "force carriers" between fundamental particles is what allows the formation of Composit Particles. Force carriers (Bosons) have no mass (although I have seen them referred to as being force carrying particles which I don't understand because I would think that a particle of any sort is of substance and therefore has mass of some sort, but apparently not) or charge (positive or negative) and therefore have no antiparticles because antiparticles are particles that have the exact same mass but opposite charges. Interestingly though, I did read in the Encyclopedia.com (see link in a previous paragraph) that the Boson W has a charge of 1 or -1, and the Boson Z has a charge of 0 (which probably means no charge ot all) The types of force carriers are as follows:
*Photon (electromagnetic force carrier)
*Gluon (strong nuclear force carrier)
*W and Z (weak nuclear force carrier)
*Graviton (gravity force carrier -- this is the only boson
that hasn't been observed directly or indirectly.
The following are the six kinds of quarks with their antiparticles and charges, and according to the Encyclopedia.com there are twelve quarks because the six quarks' antiparticles would be the other six quarks:
*Up +2/3 *Anti-Up -2/3
*Down -1/3 *Anti-Down +1/3
*Charm +2/3 *Anti-Charm -2/3
*Strange -1/3 *Anti-Strange -1/3
*Top(Truth) +2/3 *Anti-Top(Anti-Truth) -2/3
*Bottom(Beauty) -1/3 *Anti-Bottom(Anti-Beauty) +1/3
Another thing of interest about Merla's Cosmatron is that it worked on Charm quarks. This is interesting because it sounds as if she separated Charm quarks out of other quarks and concentrated just Charm quarks together. If that's what she supposively did it's interesting because quarks can't exist by themselves and must be bound to another quark or antiquark by the exchange of gluons. What that doesn't explain is what would happen if quarks were made to exist by themselves? Perhaps that's the magic of Merla's Cosmatron.
According to the article at http://physicsweb.org/article/world/13/10/9/1, "...'free' quarks must have existed in the extreme conditions of the very early universe." Also the article suggests that according to theory, at one time free quarks did exist in a very hot gas called "quark-gluon plasma" and that such a gas once existed up to approximately 40 microseconds after the big bang. So in theory, perhaps Merla's Cosmatron did something to recreate such conditions in a confined area, plus use only the charmed quarks. In fact, recreation such conditions to make "quark-gluon plasma" is also discussed in the article at http://physicsweb.org/article/world/13/10/9/1. Otherwise it's impossible to pull out an individual quark out of a meson or a baryon because of the phenomenon of confinement ( http://www.jlab.org/news/archive/2002/halld.html).
And finally many thanks to Timothy D. Chase for sending me further resources regarding quarks, and I like the way he explained the following information: "The same article [ http://physicsweb.org/article/world/13/10/9/1] gives the masses of quarks as being in the neighborhood of 1/50th to 1/200th the mass of a proton or neutron (where the additional mass of the hadrons is due to confinement energy). But outside of the plasma, quark confinement is assured by a gluonic force of which quickly approaches a constant several tons between just two quarks as they become separated" ( http://www.jlab.org/news/archive/2002/halld.html). Interesting!
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