There are multiple processes that can lead to the production of a top quark.

After a race between CERN and Fermilab to discover the top, the accelerator at CERN reached its limits without creating a single top, pushing the lower bound on its mass up to .

Each generation is divided into two leptons and two quarks.

It, along with the strange quark is part of the second generation of matter, and has an electric charge of e and a bare mass of .

In a strong interaction, a strong force particle, such as this one, interacts with a colored quark, such as this green one, to give a quark with a different color charge this red one.

In a neutron star the matter is in a state known as neutron degenerate matter, with a more exotic form of degenerate matter, QCD matter, possibly present in the core.

This process was responsible for the majority of the top events at Tevatron and was the process observed when the top was first discovered in 1995.

Baryons (three quarks) have a baryon number of 1, mesons (one quark, one antiquark) have a baryon number of 0, and antibaryons (three antiquarks) have a baryon number of 1.

Since this ratio is equal to according to the Standard Model, this gives another way of determining the CKM element , or in combination with the determination of from single top production provides tests for the assumption that the CKM matrix is unitary.

Physicists hope that further research into the reasons for the top quark's large mass of 173 GeV c2, almost the mass of a gold atom, might reveal more about the origin of the mass of quarks and other elementary particles.