• Subatomic particle

The hierarchy of subatomic particles

Subatomic particles are all particles which are "smaller" than atoms. Two great classes of subatomic particles
exist: elementary particles, which are particles with no substructure (particles that aren't made of other particles),
and composite particles, which are particles with substructure (particles that are made of other particles). Particle
physics and nuclear physics are concerned with the study of these particles as well as their their interactions.

Elementary subatomic particles are divided in three classes: quarks and leptons (particles of matter), and gauge
bosons (force carriers, such as the photon). Composite subatomic particles (such as protons or atomic nuclei) are
bound states of 2 or more elementary particles. For example, a proton is made of two up quarks and one down
quark, while the atomic nuclei of helium-4 is composed of 2 protons and 2 neutrons.

Elementary particles of the Standard Model include six different types of quark ('up', 'down', 'bottom', 'top',
'strange', and 'charm'), as well as six different leptons ('electron', 'electron neutrino', 'muon', 'muon neutrino',
'tauon', 'tauon neutrino'), four force carriers ('photon', the W and Z bosons, gluons), as well as the Higgs boson.

Composite particles include all hadrons (baryons, such as protons and neutrons, and mesons, such as pions and
kaons).

Most of the particles that have been discovered are encountered in cosmic rays interacting with matter and are
produced by scattering processes in particle accelerators. There are hundreds of known subatomic particles.

[edit] Introduction to particles

In particle physics, the conceptual idea of a particle is one of several concepts inherited from classical physics, the
world we experience, that are used to describe how matter and energy behave at the molecular scales of quantum
mechanics. For physicists, the meaning of the word "particle" is rather different from the common sense of the
term, reflecting the modern understanding of how particles are radically different at the quantum-level.

The idea of a particle is one which had to undergo serious rethinking in light of experiments which showed that
particles of light (photons) can exhibit the properties of waves. These results necessitated the new concept of
wave-particle duality to reflect that quantum-scale "particles" are understood to behave in a way resembling both
particles and waves. Another new concept, the uncertainty principle, determined that analyzing particles at these
scales would require a statistical approach. In more recent times, this wave-particle duality has been shown to
apply not only to photons, but to increasingly massive particles [1]

All of these factors ultimately combined to replace the notion of discrete "particles" with the concept of "wave-
packets" of uncertain boundaries, whose properties are only known as probabilities, and whose interactions with
other "particles" remain largely a mystery, even 80 years after the establishment of quantum mechanics.

[edit] Energy
Energy and matter we have studied from Einstein's hypotheses are analogous: matter can be austerely denoted in
terms of energy. Thus, we have only discovered two mechanisms in which energy can be transferred. These are
particles and waves. For example, light can be expressed as both particles and waves. This paradox is known as
the Wave–particle Duality Paradox. [2].

Through the work of Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, and many others, current scientific theory holds that all
particles also have a wave nature.[3] This phenomenon has been verified not only for elementary particles, but also
for compound particles like atoms and even molecules. In fact, according to traditional formulations of non-
relativistic quantum mechanics, wave–particle duality applies to all objects, even macroscopic ones; we can't
detect wave properties of macroscopic objects due to their small wavelengths.[4]
Interactions between particles have been scrutinized for many centuries, and a few simple laws underpin how
particles behave in collisions and interactions. The most fundamental of these are the laws of conservation of
energy and conservation of momentum, which facilitate us to elucidate calculations between particle interactions
on scales of magnitude which diverge between planets and quarks[5]. These are the prerequisite basics of
Newtonian mechanics, a series of statements and equations in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
originally published in 1687.

[edit] Dividing an atom

G. Johnstone Stoney postulated a fundamental unit of electrical charge in 1874, and in 1891 he suggested the
name electron (denoted e−) for this quantity.[6] The electron as a sub-atomic particle was first observed in 1897 by
J. J. Thomson. Subsequent speculation about the structure of atoms was severely constrained by the 1907
experiment of Ernest Rutherford which showed that the atom was mostly empty space, and almost all its mass was
concentrated into the (relatively) tiny atomic nucleus. The development of the quantum theory led to the
understanding of chemistry in terms of the arrangement of electrons in the mostly empty volume of atoms. Protons
(p+) were known to be the nucleus of the hydrogen atom. Neutrons (n) were postulated by Rutherford and
discovered by James Chadwick in 1932. The word nucleon denotes both the neutron and the proton.

Electrons, which are negatively charged, have a mass of 1/1836 of a hydrogen atom, the remainder of the atom's
mass coming from the positively charged proton. The atomic number of an element counts the number of protons.
Neutrons are neutral particles with a mass almost equal to that of the proton. Different isotopes of the same
nucleus contain the same number of protons but differing numbers of neutrons. The mass number of a nucleus
counts the total number of nucleons.

Chemistry concerns itself with the arrangement of electrons in atoms and molecules, and nuclear physics with the
arrangement of protons and neutrons in a nucleus. The study of subatomic particles, atoms and molecules, their
structure and interactions, involves quantum mechanics and quantum field theory (when dealing with processes
that change the number of particles). The study of subatomic particles per se is called particle physics. Since many
particles need to be created in high energy particle accelerators or cosmic rays, sometimes particle physics is also
called high energy physics.

[edit] History
J. J. Thomson discovered electrons in 1897. In 1905 Albert Einstein demonstrated the physical reality of the
photons which were postulated by Max Planck in order to solve the problem of black body radiation in
thermodynamics. Ernest Rutherford discovered in 1907 in the gold foil experiment that the atom is mainly empty
space, and that it contains a heavy but small atomic nucleus. The early successes of the quantum theory involved
explaining properties of atoms in terms of their electronic structure. The proton was soon identified as the nucleus
of hydrogen. The neutron was postulated by Rutherford following his discovery of the nucleus, but was discovered
by James Chadwick much later, in 1932. Neutrinos were postulated in 1931 by Wolfgang Pauli (and named by
Enrico Fermi) to be produced in beta decays (the weak interaction) of neutrons, but were not discovered till 1956.
Pions were postulated by Hideki Yukawa as mediators of the strong force which binds the nucleus together. The
muon was discovered in 1936 by Carl D. Anderson, and initially mistaken for the pion. In the 1950s the first kaons
were discovered in cosmic rays.

The development of new particle accelerators and particle detectors in the 1950s led to the discovery of a huge
variety of hadrons, prompting Wolfgang Pauli's remark: "Had I foreseen this, I would have gone into botany". The
classification of hadrons through the quark model in 1961 was the beginning of the golden age of modern particle
physics, which culminated in the completion of the unified theory called the standard model in the 1970s. The
discovery of the weak gauge bosons through the 1980s, and the verification of their properties through the 1990s
is considered to be an age of consolidation in particle physics. Among the standard model particles the existence
of the Higgs boson remains to be verified— this is seen as the primary physics goal of the accelerator called the
Large Hadron Collider in CERN. All currently known particles fit into the standard model.