ELEMENTARY

PARTICLES

ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
Elementary Particles,inphysics,particles that cannot be
broken down into any other particles. The term
elementary particles also is used more loosely to include
some subatomic particles that are composed of other
particles. Particles that cannot be broken further are
sometimes called fundamental particles to avoid
confusion. These fundamental particles provide the
basic units that make up all matter and energy in the
universe.

ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
Scientistsandphilosophers have sought to identify and
study elementary particles since ancient times. Aristotle
and other ancient Greek philosophers believed that all
things were composed of four elementary materials:
fire, water, air, and earth. People in other ancient
cultures developed similar notions of basic substances.
As early scientists began collecting and analyzing
information about the world, they showed that these
materials were not fundamental but were made of other

ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
Inthe1800sBritishphysicist John Dalton was so sure he
had identified the most basic objects that he called
them atoms (from the Greek word for indivisible). By
the early 1900s scientists were able to break apart
these atoms into particles that they called the electron
and the nucleus. Electrons surround the dense nucleus
of an atom. In the 1930s, researchers showed that the
nucleus consists of smaller particles, called the proton
and the neutron. Today, scientists have evidence that
the proton and neutron are themselves made up of even

WHAT MAKES UP THE

In1925Austrian-born
American physicist Wolfgang Pauli
UNIVERSE?
formulated a rule of physics that helped define fermions. He
suggested that no two electrons can have the same
properties and locations. He proposed this exclusion
principle to explain why all of the electrons in atoms have
slightly different amounts of energy. In 1926 Italian-born
American physicist Enrico Fermi and British physicist Paul
Dirac developed equations that describe electron behavior,
providing mathematical proof of the exclusion principle.
Physicists call particles that obey the exclusion principle

PARTICLES IN MATTER
Ordinarymattermakes up all the objects and materials
familiar to life on Earth, including people, cars,
buildings, mountains, air, and clouds. Stars, planets, and
other celestial bodies also contain ordinary matter. The
fundamental fermions that make up matter fall into two
categories: leptons and quarks. Each lepton and quark
has an antiparticle partner, with the same mass but
opposite charge.

PARTICLES IN MATTER
Leptons and quarks differ from each other in two main
ways: (1) the electric charge they carry and (2) the way
they interact with each other and with other particles.
Scientists usually state the electric charge of a particle
as a multiple of the electric charge of a proton, which is
1.602 10-19 coulombs (C). Leptons have electric
charges of either -1 or 0 (neutral), with their
antiparticles having charges of +1 or 0. Quarks have
electric charges of either + or -. Antiquarks have
electric charges of either - or +. Leptons interact

LEPTONS
American physicist Martin L. Perl shared the 1995 Nobel
Prize in physics for his discovery of an elementary particle
known as the tau lepton. He described the detection of the
tau lepton in a 1978 article in Scientific American. At the
time, several fundamental particles were thought to exist
but had not yet been detected. Physicists were unsure if
there would be an end to this proliferation of newly
identified elementary particles. As of 1998, physicists
believe that there are three and only three families of
matter. The first family of matter includes the electron and
the two types of quarks that make up the proton and

LEPTONS
Scientistsdivideleptons into two groups: particles that
have electric charges and particles, called neutrinos,
that are electrically neutral. Each of the three
generations contains a charged lepton and a neutrino.
The first generation of leptons consists of the electron
(e-) and the electron neutrino ( e); the second
generation, the muon () and the muon neutrino ( );
and the third generation, the tau (t) and the tau
neutrino (t;).

QUARKS
Thefundamentalparticles that make up protons and
neutrons are called quarks. Like leptons, quarks come in
six varieties, or flavors, divided into three generations.
Unlike leptons, however, quarks never exist alonethey
are always combined with other quarks. In fact, quarks
cannot be isolated even with the most advanced
laboratory equipment and processes. Scientists have
had to determine the charges and approximate masses
of quarks mathematically by studying particles that
contain quarks.

THE HIGGS BOSON

Thestandardmodelof
particle
physics
includes
an
elementary boson that is not a force carrier: the Higgs boson.
Scientists have not yet detected the Higgs boson in an
experiment, but they believe it gives elementary particles
their mass. Composite particles receive their mass from their
constituent particles, and in some cases, the energy involved
in holding these particles together. For example, the mass of a
neutron comes from the mass of its quarks and the energy of
the strong force holding the quarks together. The quarks
themselves, however, have no such source of mass, which is
why physicists introduced the idea of the Higgs boson.

THE HIGGS BOSON

Thestandardmodelof
particle
physics
includes
an
elementary boson that is not a force carrier: the Higgs boson.
Scientists have not yet detected the Higgs boson in an
experiment, but they believe it gives elementary particles
their mass. Composite particles receive their mass from their
constituent particles, and in some cases, the energy involved
in holding these particles together. For example, the mass of a
neutron comes from the mass of its quarks and the energy of
the strong force holding the quarks together. The quarks
themselves, however, have no such source of mass, which is
why physicists introduced the idea of the Higgs boson.