The Eightfold Way classification is named after the following fact: If we take three flavors of quarks, then the quarks lie in the fundamental representation, 3 (called the triplet) of flavor SU(3). The antiquarks lie in the complex conjugate representation . The nine states (nonet) made out of a pair can be decomposed into the trivial representation, 1 (called the singlet), and the adjoint representation, 8 (called the octet). The notation for this decomposition is
