Quark
The quark model was independently proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964. Quarks were introduced as parts of an ordering scheme for hadrons, and there was little evidence for their physical existence until deep inelastic scattering experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1968. Accelerator experiments have provided evidence for all six flavors. The top quark, first observed at Fermilab in 1995, was the last to be discovered.
Shoichi Sakata
In 1959, Ikeda, Ogawa and Ohnuki
and, independently, Yamaguchi
found out the U(3) symmetry in the Sakata model. The U(3) symmetry provides a mathematical descriptions of hadrons in the eightfold way
idea (1961) of Murray Gell-Mann. Sakata's model was superseded by the quark model, proposed by Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964, which keeps the U(3) symmetry, but made the constituents fractionally charged and rejected the idea that they could be identified with observed particles. Still, within Japan, integer charged quark models parallel to Sakata's were used until the 1970s, and are still used as effective descriptions in certain domains.