Fundamental Particles:

The concept of a particle is a natural idealization of our everyday observation of

matter. Dust particles or baseballs, under ordinary conditions, are stable objects
that move as a whole and obey simple laws of motion. However, neither of these
is actually a structureless object. That is, if sufficiently large forces are applied to
them, they can readily be broken apart into smaller pieces.

The idea that there must be some set of smallest constituent parts, which are the
building blocks of all matter, is a very old one.

Democritus (born about 460 BC in Abdera, Thrace, Greece) is often credited with
introducing this idea, though his concept of the building block was quite different
from ours today. He introduced the word which in English translates as atom to
describe the parts, whatever they might be.
Democritus

History plays tricks with language, however. The word atom has acquired a
meaning today that only partly matches Democritus' idea. Certainly we know that
matter is indeed composed of the objects we call atoms. Atoms were originally
thought to be indivisible, that is, the smallest particle. However we now
understand that atoms are built up of smaller parts. These parts are electrons
and a nucleus. The nucleus is much smaller than the atom and is itself
composed of protons and neutrons.

What Does "Fundamental" Mean?

In the 1930s, it seemed that protons, neutrons, and electrons were the smallest
objects into which matter could be divided and they were termed "elementary
particles". The word elementary then meant "having no smaller constituent
parts", or "indivisible" -- the new "atoms", in the original sense.

Again, later knowledge changed our understanding as physicists discovered yet

another layer of structure within the protons and neutrons. It is now known that
protons and neutrons are made up quarks. Over 100 other "elementary" particles
were discovered between 1930 and the present time. These elementary particles
are all made from quarks and/or antiquarks. These particles are called
hadrons.

Once quarks were discovered, it was clear that all these hadrons were
composite objects, so only in out-dated text books are they still called
"elementary". Leptons, on the other hand, still appear to be structureless.
Today, quarks and leptons, and their antiparticles, are candidates for being the
fundamental building blocks from which all else is made. Particle physicists call
them the "fundamental" or "elementary" particles -- both names denoting that, as
far as current experiments can tell, they have no substructure.

What are Fundamental Particles?

In the modern theory, known as the Standard Model there are 12 fundamental
matter particle types and their corresponding antiparticles.
The matter particles divide into two classes, quarks and leptons. There are six
particles of each class and six corresponding antiparticles.
In addition, there are gluons, photons, and W and Z bosons, the force carrier
particles that are responsible for strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions
respectively. These force carriers are also fundamental particles.

Are Quarks and Leptons Structureless?

All we know is that quarks and leptons are smaller than 10-19 meters in
radius. As far as we can tell, they have no internal structure or even any size. It
is possible that future evidence will, once again, show this understanding to be
an illusion and demonstrate that there is substructure within the particles that we
now view as fundamental.

Antiparticles
In particle physics, every particle has a corresponding antiparticle. A particle and
its antiparticle have identical mass and spin.

A particle and its antiparticle have opposite values for all other non-zero quantum
number labels. These labels are electric charge, color charge, flavor, electron
number, muon number, tau number, and baryon number.

Every fermion (lepton and quarks) carries some charge-like quantum number
labels, and each has a distinct antiparticle partner with opposite values for those
labels. For example, the antiparticle of an electron is a positron -- it has exactly
the same mass as an electron but positive electric charge. (The positron is the
only antiparticle with its own name. In all other cases, the name of the antiparticle
is anti- in front of the name of the particle, such as proton and anti-proton.)

Charged bosons always have an antiparticle partner of opposite charge and

equal mass. For charge zero mesons with different types of quark and antiquark,
there is an antiparticle partner of that reverses the role of quark and antiquark.
The Ko meson and its antiparticle have the following composition.

Symbol Name Quarks Anti-quarks

K-zero d quark s anti-quark
K-zero-bar s quark d anti-quark

For charge zero mesons with the same type of quark and antiquark, and for the
charge zero force carriers (photon and Z), the particle and the antiparticle are
identical. The antiparticle of a photon is a photon, likewise the antiparticle of a phi
meson (s quark and anti-s quark) is a phi meson.

Gluons are force carriers with zero electric charge, but each type of gluon has a
color charge. Thus each gluon has a corresponding antiparticle with a related
color charge.

Matter and Antimatter

We call commonly observed particles such as protons, neutrons, and electrons

"matter" particles, and their antiparticles are then "antimatter."

The term matter is then extended, by convention, to include:

All quarks, (charges +2/3 and -1/3).

All negatively charged leptons.
Left handed neutrinos.
Antimatter is, then, any particle built from:

Antiquarks (charges of -2/3 or +1/3).

Positively charged leptons.
Right-handed neutrinos.
A particle made from quarks, such as a baryon, is called matter. Similarly, a
particle made from antiquarks, such as the antibaryon, is called antimatter.

For bosons, there is no distinction between matter and antimatter. These

classifications simply do not apply. For example, a positively charged pion
contains an up type quark and a down type antiquark. The negatively charged
pion contains a down type quark and up type antiquark. Each of these particles is
the antiparticle of the other, but neither can be called either matter or antimatter.
Similarly, force carrier particles cannot be classified as either matter or
antimatter.

In The Standard Model, properties of matter and antimatter are almost identical.
One of the big mysteries of cosmology (the theory of the evolution of the
universe) is to explain why the universe contains matter in preference to
antimatter. A universe where matter and antimatter occurred equally would not
contain galaxies, but only black-body radiation - like the microwave background
seen in all directions.
Want to learn more about antimatter? Take a look at a Scientific American "Ask
the Experts" column written by R. Michael Barnett of the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory and Helen Quinn (left) of the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center.

Pair Production and Annihilation

Whenever sufficient energy is available to provide the mass-energy, a particle

and its matching antiparticle can be produced together. All the conservation laws
apply in these processes.

When a particle collides with a matching antiparticle, they may annihilate--which

means they both disappear. Their energy appears in the form of some
fundamental boson--a gluon, a photon or a Z particle. The bosons then decay to
produce other particles and antiparticles. During any process, the number of
particles plus antiparticles of a related type are conserved -- their total is the
same before and after the process.

In weak interaction processes, a quark and antiquark of different flavors can

annihilate into, or be produced by decay of a W boson. The total charge of the
pair must be +1 or -1. W bosons can also decay to produce, or be produced from
annihilation of, a charge -1 lepton and a matching anti-neutrino, or an anti-lepton
(charge +1) and its matching neutrino.

Quarks:
Quarks are fundamental matter particles that are constituents of neutrons and
protons and other hadrons. There are six different types of quarks. Each quark
type is called a flavor.

Flavor Mass
(GeV/c2) Electric Charge
(e)
u up 0.004 +2/3
d down 0.008 -1/3
c charm 1.5 +2/3
s strange 0.15 -1/3
t top 176 +2/3
b bottom 4.7 -1/3

Quark Masses:

Quarks only exist inside hadrons because they are confined by the strong (or
color charge) force fields. Therefore, we cannot measure their mass by isolating
them. Furthermore, the mass of a hadron gets contributions from quark kinetic
energy and from potential energy due to strong interactions. For hadrons made
of the light quark types, the quark mass is a small contribution to the total hadron
mass. For example, compare the mass of a proton (0.938 GeV/c2) to the sum of
the masses of two up quarks and one down quark (total of 0.02 GeV/c2).

So the question is, what do we mean by the mass of a quark and how do we
measure it. The quantity we call quark mass is actually related to the m in F = ma
(force = mass x acceleration). This equation tells us how an object will behave
when a force is applied. The equations of particle physics include, for example,
calculations of what happens to a quark when struck by a high energy photon.
The parameter we call quark mass controls its acceleration when a force is
applied. It is fixed to give the best match between theory and experiment both for
the ratio of masses of various hadrons and for the behavior of quarks in high
energy experiments. However, neither of these methods can precisely determine
quark masses.

How Do We Know Quarks Are Real?

A question you might well ask! If we cannot separate them out, how do we know
they are there? The answer is simply that all our calculations depend on their
existence and give the right answers for the experiments.

For example, when we bounce electrons off of protons and neutrons, the pattern
of scattering angles observed is characteristic of point-like spin-1/2 scatters. The
relative rates for electron versus neutrino scattering is that predicted from the
quark electric charges. The process of electron-positron annihilation to quark
pairs gives similar characteristic predictions, all these are also confirmed
experimentally. The accumulation of many such results, where experiments
match predictions based on quarks, convinces us that quarks are real.

Leptons:
Leptons are fundamental particles that have no strong interactions. The six
known types of leptons are shown in the table below. There are also six anti-
lepton types, one for each lepton.

Flavor Mass
(GeV/c2) Electric Charge
(e)
electron neutrino <7 x 10-9 0
electron 0.000511 -1
muon neutrino <0.0003 0
muon
(mu-minus) 0.106 -1
tau neutrino <0.03 0
tau
(tau-minus) 1.7771 -1
Electrons and Positrons:

The electron has a mass of 0.000511 GeV/c2. The electron is the least massive
charged particle of any type. It is absolutely stable because conservation of
energy and electric charge together forbid any decay.

The antiparticle of the electron is called a positron. It has exactly the same mass
as the electron, but the opposite sign (+1) for its electric charge. Positrons are
also stable particles. However, positrons can annihilate when they meet an
electron. Both the electron and the positron vanish, and their energy goes into
photons and, possibly, more massive particles. Conversely, photons with
sufficient energy (E > 2x (mass of electron) x c2) can produce an electron and a
positron -- this is called pair production.

Muons (µ):

The muon has a mass of 0.106 GeV/c2. The negatively charged muon (mu-
minus) is just like an electron, except it is more massive. Muons are unstable --
they decay to produce a virtual W-boson and the matching neutrino type. The W-
boson then decays to produce an electron and an electron-type anti-neutrino.

The antiparticle of a mu-minus is a mu-plus. Particle physicists use the name

muon for either mu-plus or a mu-minus a muon. The mu-plus decays to produce
an anti-muon type neutrino and a W-plus boson, which then decays to a positron
and an electron-type neutrino.

Muons are produced in particle physics experiments. They also are produced by
cosmic rays. Because they are much more massive than electrons, muons
readily pass through the electric fields inside matter with very little deflection. So,
muons do not radiate and slow down as electrons do. However, they can cause
ionization and this makes them readily detectable in matter, for example, with a
Geiger counter.

Tau Leptons (τ):

The tau-minus is a electron-like particle with a mass of 1.784 GeV/c2. Its

antiparticle, the tau-plus, has the same mass but a positive electric charge.
These particles were discovered at SLAC in experiments at SPEAR . The 1995
Nobel Prize was awarded for this discovery.

This third type of charged lepton is also unstable. The tau-minus decays to
produce its matching neutrino and a virtual W-minus boson. The W-minus has
enough energy that there are several possible ways for it to decay, such as:

An electron and an electron-type antineutrino.

A um-minus and an muon- type antineutrino.
A down quark and an up-type antiquark.
An s quark and an up-type antiquark.
The quark and antiquark do not emerge individually. One or more mesons
emerge from the decay that contain the initial quark and antiquark, and possible
additional quark-antiquark pairs produced from the energy in the strong force
field between them.

For tau-plus, a similar set of decays occurs -- just replace every particle by its
antiparticle (and vice-versa, every antiparticle by the matching particle.) Thus, for
example, tau-plus can decay to give a tau type anti-neutrino and a positron and
an electron-type neutrino.

Neutrinos (,ν ,):

There are three types of neutrinos, one associated with each type of charged
lepton. All are particles that are somewhat like electrons: they have half a
quantum unit of spin angular momentum, and do not participate in strong
interactions.

However, neutrinos differ from electrons in that they have zero electric charge
and, as far as we know today, zero mass. (See, however, evidence for neutrino
mass discovered in Japan.) Experimentally, all we can do is set an upper limit on
their masses -- they are smaller than some value. Larger masses would have
had observable effects in some experiment. The limits are:

less than 0.00000002 GeV/c2 for electron type neutrinos (or antineutrinos).
less than 0.0003 GeV/c2for muon type neutrinos (or antineutrinos).
less than 0.04 GeV/c2for tau type neutrinos (or antineutrinos).
The only known difference between the three neutrino types is which type of the
charged lepton they are associated with during production or decay processes.

Since neutrinos have no electric charge, they participate only in weak interaction
or gravitational processes. For this reason, they are very difficult to detect. We
observe them only by the effects they have on other particles with which they
interact.

For example, a high-energy electron-type neutrino can convert to an electron by

exchanging a W-boson with a neutron (which becomes a proton when it absorbs
the W boson). This rarely happens. With an intense source of neutrinos and a
large detector containing many neutrons, one can observe events with no visible
initiating particles that can only be explained as neutrino-initiated processes.
What is seen in the detector is the recoiling electron and proton after the process
occurs. (Experimental work demonstrating this process resulted in Frederick
Reines sharing the 1995 Nobel Prize with Martin Perl.)
Even harder to see is the process where the neutrino is deflected by exchanging
a Z-boson with a proton or neutron. The proton or neutron gains energy from this
exchange, so one searches for events where a recoiling proton or neutron is
seen with no associated electron and no visible initiating particle.

In high-energy particle experiments, we often use energy and momentum

conservation to infer that production of one or more neutrinos occurred. If the
detector detects everything but neutrinos, then an event where the total final
energy detected (or the total final momentum) does not match the initial energy
(or momentum) in the incoming particles, then neutrinos must have been
produced. The neutrinos carried off the missing energy (and momentum).