The particle zoo
- 1. The Particle Zoo By Jason Beedle
- 2. Quarks, Leptons, Baryons, oh my! The universe is filled with a vast assortment of different particles. These particles make everything look, work, and act the way they do in our world. On the right there is a picture of some of the most well known particles. These particles include the proton, the neutron, and the electron. These particles make up atoms, which are the building blocks of normal matter, but all of these particles, excluding the electron are made up of even smaller particles called quarks. All of these different particles are divided into different classes like the baryons, mesons, and leptons. Baryons consist of some of the larger particles like the proton and the neutron. Mesons are made up of very interesting particles like the pion and some mesons are even heavier than a proton. Lastly, the Leptons are fundamental particles like the electron.
- 3. The different quarks Quarks are the particles that make up most of the particles in the atom. Only the fundamental electron is not made up of these little building blocks. They are a fundamental particle, which means that they are not a composite particle, or made up of smaller entities. They are strongly interacting and never appear singly. They are the building blocks of the baryons and meson particles and in the picture above you can see that they have a picture of the inside of a proton and it has three different colored balls inside. Each of these balls is a quark, the reason that they are multicolored is because quarks come in three colors which is called a color charge. The quarks can either be colored red, green, and blue. Antiquarks, the anti particle to the quark, come in the colors of antired, antigreen, and antiblue. If a red, a green, and a blue quark are combined they become colorless. The same goes for their anti particle pairs. A proton or any baryon has a total of three quarks inside of it. Quarks are held in protons and other particles by gluons which are interacting particles whose pulling force is increased the farther the quark is from the center of the particle. This makes it nye on impossible to isolate a single quark. To date we have never actually seen a quark by itself.
- 4. Baryons Baryons are some of the most massive particles in the particle zoo. On the right you can see two of the most well known particles, which also happen to be baryons. They are the proton and neutron. Each baryon has three quarks in it and each quark has something called baryonic charge. Every quark has a baryonic charge of 1/3, making a proton which has three quarks have a baryonic charge of one. Baryons are also part of a group called the Hadrons which are composite particles made up of quarks. The mesons also share the distinction of being in this group.
- 5. Mesons Mesons are very interesting particles. They are classified in the same group as baryons (the Hadrons group) which means that mesons are also made out of quarks. But unlike baryons, mesons are made up of one regular quark and one anti-quark making mesons their own anti-particle. Talk about not liking your relatives. Some mesons are very massive, even more massive than the proton. Mesons are not all very massive as there is the pion, which is the least massive meson. Mesons are also very unstable, lasting no longer than a few hundredths of a microsecond.
- 6. Leptons Leptons are fundamental particles and contain no quarks. Leptons include six different particles which are the tau, the muon, the electron, tau-neutrino, muon-neutrino, and the electron-neutrino. The electron is most likely the most well known lepton. It is found whizzing around the nucleus or the center of atoms. The second most well known lepton is the neutrino which is a very weak interacting particle. Neutrinos are created as a byproduct of the nuclear fusion inside of stars and right now there is about 65 billion solar neutrinos passing through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the sun every second.
- 7. Bosons Fermions Bosons are social particles, that Fermions are anti-social particles, include the pion, which is a meson. that include quarks, leptons, and In fact all mesons are bosons, the baryons. These are all fermions, reason behind this is that all particles because they all have an odd that have an even number of quarks number of quarks. Fermions are are boson. Bosons are very social “anti-social” because they follow particles which means that two the exclusion principal, which says identical bosons can occupy the that no two identical fermions can same state of motion at the same occupy the same state of motion time and “prefer” to. at the same time.
- 8. The Higgs Boson The Higgs Boson is a theoretical particle that creates the Higgs field, which gives particles their mass. The Higgs boson may have been detected at the Large Hadron Collider this year. The Higgs is very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately. It has no spin, electric charge, or color charge and is classified as a boson. Quarks Gluons
- 9. Sources: Ford, W. Kenneth. The Quantum World, Quantum Physics for Everyone. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_b oson. Higgs Boson-Wikipedia. Access date, 12/4/12.