The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces (electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions – excluding gravity) in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles. It was developed in stages throughout the latter half of the 20th century, through the work of many scientists worldwide, with the current formulation being finalized in the mid-1970s upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks. Since then, proof of the top quark (1995), the tau neutrino (2000), and the Higgs boson (2012) have added further credence to the Standard Model. In addition, the Standard Model has predicted various properties of weak neutral currents and the W and Z bosons with great accuracy.
Although the Standard Model is believed to be theoretically self-consistent and has demonstrated some success in providing experimental predictions, it leaves some physical phenomena unexplained and so falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions. For example, it does not fully explain baryon asymmetry, incorporate the full theory of gravitation as described by general relativity, or account for the universe’s accelerating expansion as possibly described by dark energy. The model does not contain any viable dark matter particle that possesses all of the required properties deduced from observational cosmology. It also does not incorporate neutrino oscillations and their non-zero masses.
The development of the Standard Model was driven by theoretical and experimental particle physicists alike. The Standard Model is a paradigm of a quantum field theory for theorists, exhibiting a wide range of phenomena, including spontaneous symmetry breaking, anomalies, and non-perturbative behavior. It is used as a basis for building more exotic models that incorporate hypothetical particles, extra dimensions, and elaborate symmetries (such as supersymmetry) to explain experimental results at variance with the Standard Model, such as the existence of dark matter and neutrino oscillations.
In particle physics, a hadron is a composite subatomic particle made of two or more quarks held together by the strong interaction. They are analogous to molecules that are held together by the electric force. Most of the mass of ordinary matter comes from two hadrons: the proton and the neutron, while most of the mass of the protons and neutrons is in turn due to the binding energy of their constituent quarks, due to the strong force.
Hadrons are categorized into two broad families: baryons, made of an odd number of quarks (usually three quarks) and mesons, made of an even number of quarks (usually two quarks: one quark and one antiquark). Protons and neutrons (which make the majority of the mass of an atom) are examples of baryons; pions are an example of a meson. “Exotic” hadrons, containing more than three valence quarks, have been discovered in recent years. A tetraquark state (an exotic meson), named the Z(4430)−, was discovered in 2007 by the Belle Collaboration and confirmed as a resonance in 2014 by the LHCb collaboration. Two pentaquark states (exotic baryons), named P+ c(4380) and P+ c(4450), were discovered in 2015 by the LHCb collaboration. There are several more exotic hadron candidates and other colour-singlet quark combinations that may also exist.
Almost all “free” hadrons and antihadrons (meaning, in isolation and not bound within an atomic nucleus) are believed to be unstable and eventually decay into other particles. The only known possible exception is free protons, which appear to be stable, or at least, take immense amounts of time to decay (order of 1034+ years). By way of comparison, free neutrons are the longest-lived unstable particle, and decay with a half-life of about 879 seconds. Experimentally, hadron physics is studied by colliding hadrons, e.g. protons, with each other or the nuclei of dense, heavy elements, such as lead or gold, and detecting the debris in the produced particle showers. A similar process occurs in the natural environment, in the extreme upper-atmosphere, where muons and mesons such as pions are produced by the collisions of cosmic rays with rarefied gas particles in the outer atmosphere.
In particle physics, a meson is a type of hadronicsubatomic particle composed of an equal number of quarks and antiquarks, usually one of each, bound together by the strong interaction. Because mesons are composed of quark subparticles, they have a meaningful physical size, a diameter of roughly one femtometre (10−15 m),[1] which is about 0.6 times the size of a proton or neutron. All mesons are unstable, with the longest-lived lasting for only a few tenths of a nanosecond. Heavier mesons decay to lighter mesons and ultimately to stable electrons, neutrinos and photons.
Outside the nucleus, mesons appear in nature only as short-lived products of very high-energy collisions between particles made of quarks, such as cosmic rays (high-energy protons and neutrons) and baryonic matter. Mesons are routinely produced artificially in cyclotrons or other particle accelerators in the collisions of protons, antiprotons, or other particles.
Higher-energy (more massive) mesons were created momentarily in the Big Bang, but are not thought to play a role in nature today. However, such heavy mesons are regularly created in particle accelerator experiments that explore the nature of the heavier quarks that compose the heavier mesons.
Mesons are part of the hadron particle family, which are defined simply as particles composed of two or more quarks. The other members of the hadron family are the baryons: subatomic particles composed of odd numbers of valence quarks (at least 3), and some experiments show evidence of exotic mesons, which do not have the conventional valence quark content of two quarks (one quark and one antiquark), but 4 or more.
Because quarks have a spin 1/2, the difference in quark number between mesons and baryons results in conventional two-quark mesons being bosons, whereas baryons are fermions.
Each type of meson has a corresponding antiparticle (antimeson) in which quarks are replaced by their corresponding antiquarks and vice versa. For example, a positive pion ( π+ ) is made of one up quark and one down antiquark; and its corresponding antiparticle, the negative pion ( π− ), is made of one up antiquark and one down quark.
Because mesons are composed of quarks, they participate in both the weak interaction and strong interaction. Mesons with net electric charge also participate in the electromagnetic interaction. Mesons are classified according to their quark content, total angular momentum, parity and various other properties, such as C-parity and G-parity. Although no meson is stable, those of lower mass are nonetheless more stable than the more massive, and hence are easier to observe and study in particle accelerators or in cosmic ray experiments. The lightest group of mesons is less massive than the lightest group of baryons, meaning that they are more easily produced in experiments, and thus exhibit certain higher-energy phenomena more readily than do baryons. But mesons can be quite massive: for example, the J/Psi meson ( J/ψ ) containing the charm quark, first seen 1974, is about three times as massive as a proton, and the upsilon meson ( ϒ ) containing the bottom quark, first seen in 1977, is about ten times as massive.
The quark content of a proton. The color assignment of individual quarks is arbitrary, but all three colors must be present. Forces between quarks are mediated by gluons.
A proton is a stable subatomic particle, symbol p, H+, or 1H+ with a positive electric charge of +1 e (elementary charge). Its mass is slightly less than that of a neutron and 1,836 times the mass of an electron (the proton-to-electron mass ratio). Protons and neutrons, each with masses of approximately one atomic mass unit, are jointly referred to as “nucleons” (particles present in atomic nuclei).
One or more protons are present in the nucleus of every atom. They provide the attractive electrostatic central force that binds the atomic electrons. The number of protons in the nucleus is the defining property of an element, and is referred to as the atomic number (represented by the symbol Z). Since each element has a unique number of protons, each element has its own unique atomic number, which determines the number of atomic electrons and consequently the chemical characteristics of the element.
The word proton is Greek for “first”, and this name was given to the hydrogen nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1920. In previous years, Rutherford had discovered that the hydrogen nucleus (known to be the lightest nucleus) could be extracted from the nuclei of nitrogen by atomic collisions. Protons were therefore a candidate to be a fundamental or elementary particle, and hence a building block of nitrogen and all other heavier atomic nuclei.
Although protons were originally considered to be elementary particles, in the modern Standard Model of particle physics, protons are now known to be composite particles, containing three valence quarks, and together with neutrons are now classified as hadrons. Protons are composed of two up quarks of charge +(2/3)e and one down quark of charge −(1/3)e. The rest masses of quarks contribute only about 1% of a proton’s mass. The remainder of a proton’s mass is due to quantum chromodynamics binding energy, which includes the kinetic energy of the quarks and the energy of the gluon fields that bind the quarks together. Because protons are not fundamental particles, they possess a measurable size; the root mean square charge radius of a proton is about 0.84–0.87 fm (1 fm = 10−15 m). In 2019, two different studies, using different techniques, found this radius to be 0.833 fm, with an uncertainty of ±0.010 fm.
Free protons occur occasionally on Earth: thunderstorms can produce protons with energies of up to several tens of MeV. At sufficiently low temperatures and kinetic energies, free protons will bind to electrons. However, the character of such bound protons does not change, and they remain protons. A fast proton moving through matter will slow by interactions with electrons and nuclei, until it is captured by the electron cloud of an atom. The result is a protonated atom, which is a chemical compound of hydrogen. In a vacuum, when free electrons are present, a sufficiently slow proton may pick up a single free electron, becoming a neutral hydrogen atom, which is chemically a free radical. Such “free hydrogen atoms” tend to react chemically with many other types of atoms at sufficiently low energies. When free hydrogen atoms react with each other, they form neutral hydrogen molecules (H2), which are the most common molecular component of molecular clouds in interstellar space.
Free protons are routinely used for accelerators for proton therapy or various particle physics experiments, with the most powerful example being the Large Hadron Collider.
The quark content of an antiproton. The color assignment of individual quarks is arbitrary, but all three colors must be present. Forces between quarks are mediated by gluons.
The antiproton is the antiparticle of the proton. Antiprotons are stable, but they are typically short-lived, since any collision with a proton will cause both particles to be annihilated in a burst of energy.
The existence of the antiproton with electric charge of −1 e, opposite to the electric charge of +1 e of the proton, was predicted by Paul Dirac in his 1933 Nobel Prize lecture.
The antiproton was first experimentally confirmed in 1955 at the Bevatron particle accelerator by University of California, Berkeley physicists Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain.
The properties of the antiproton that have been measured all match the corresponding properties of the proton, with the exception that the antiproton has electric charge and magnetic moment that are the opposites of those in the proton, which is to be expected from the antimatter equivalent of a proton. The questions of how matter is different from antimatter, and the relevance of antimatter in explaining how our universe survived the Big Bang, remain open problems—open, in part, due to the relative scarcity of antimatter in today’s universe.
Antiprotons have been detected in cosmic rays beginning in 1979, first by balloon-borne experiments and more recently by satellite-based detectors. The standard picture for their presence in cosmic rays is that they are produced in collisions of cosmic ray protons with atomic nuclei in the interstellar medium, via the reaction. Their energy spectrum is modified by collisions with other atoms in the interstellar medium, and antiprotons can also be lost by “leaking out” of the galaxy.
The antiproton cosmic ray energy spectrum is now measured reliably and is consistent with this standard picture of antiproton production by cosmic ray collisions. These experimental measurements set upper limits on the number of antiprotons that could be produced in exotic ways, such as from annihilation of supersymmetric dark matter particles in the galaxy or from the Hawking radiation caused by the evaporation of primordial black holes. This also provides a lower limit on the antiproton lifetime of about 1–10 million years. Since the galactic storage time of antiprotons is about 10 million years, an intrinsic decay lifetime would modify the galactic residence time and distort the spectrum of cosmic ray antiprotons.
The magnitude of properties of the antiproton are predicted by CPT symmetry to be exactly related to those of the proton. In particular, CPT symmetry predicts the mass and lifetime of the antiproton to be the same as those of the proton, and the electric charge and magnetic moment of the antiproton to be opposite in sign and equal in magnitude to those of the proton. CPT symmetry is a basic consequence of quantum field theory and no violations of it have ever been detected.
Standard Model
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces (electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions – excluding gravity) in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles. It was developed in stages throughout the latter half of the 20th century, through the work of many scientists worldwide, with the current formulation being finalized in the mid-1970s upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks. Since then, proof of the top quark (1995), the tau neutrino (2000), and the Higgs boson (2012) have added further credence to the Standard Model. In addition, the Standard Model has predicted various properties of weak neutral currents and the W and Z bosons with great accuracy.
Although the Standard Model is believed to be theoretically self-consistent and has demonstrated some success in providing experimental predictions, it leaves some physical phenomena unexplained and so falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions. For example, it does not fully explain baryon asymmetry, incorporate the full theory of gravitation as described by general relativity, or account for the universe’s accelerating expansion as possibly described by dark energy. The model does not contain any viable dark matter particle that possesses all of the required properties deduced from observational cosmology. It also does not incorporate neutrino oscillations and their non-zero masses.
The development of the Standard Model was driven by theoretical and experimental particle physicists alike. The Standard Model is a paradigm of a quantum field theory for theorists, exhibiting a wide range of phenomena, including spontaneous symmetry breaking, anomalies, and non-perturbative behavior. It is used as a basis for building more exotic models that incorporate hypothetical particles, extra dimensions, and elaborate symmetries (such as supersymmetry) to explain experimental results at variance with the Standard Model, such as the existence of dark matter and neutrino oscillations.
Hadron
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadron
In particle physics, a hadron is a composite subatomic particle made of two or more quarks held together by the strong interaction. They are analogous to molecules that are held together by the electric force. Most of the mass of ordinary matter comes from two hadrons: the proton and the neutron, while most of the mass of the protons and neutrons is in turn due to the binding energy of their constituent quarks, due to the strong force.
Hadrons are categorized into two broad families: baryons, made of an odd number of quarks (usually three quarks) and mesons, made of an even number of quarks (usually two quarks: one quark and one antiquark). Protons and neutrons (which make the majority of the mass of an atom) are examples of baryons; pions are an example of a meson. “Exotic” hadrons, containing more than three valence quarks, have been discovered in recent years. A tetraquark state (an exotic meson), named the Z(4430)−, was discovered in 2007 by the Belle Collaboration and confirmed as a resonance in 2014 by the LHCb collaboration. Two pentaquark states (exotic baryons), named P+
c(4380) and P+
c(4450), were discovered in 2015 by the LHCb collaboration. There are several more exotic hadron candidates and other colour-singlet quark combinations that may also exist.
Almost all “free” hadrons and antihadrons (meaning, in isolation and not bound within an atomic nucleus) are believed to be unstable and eventually decay into other particles. The only known possible exception is free protons, which appear to be stable, or at least, take immense amounts of time to decay (order of 1034+ years). By way of comparison, free neutrons are the longest-lived unstable particle, and decay with a half-life of about 879 seconds. Experimentally, hadron physics is studied by colliding hadrons, e.g. protons, with each other or the nuclei of dense, heavy elements, such as lead or gold, and detecting the debris in the produced particle showers. A similar process occurs in the natural environment, in the extreme upper-atmosphere, where muons and mesons such as pions are produced by the collisions of cosmic rays with rarefied gas particles in the outer atmosphere.
Meson
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meson
In particle physics, a meson is a type of hadronic subatomic particle composed of an equal number of quarks and antiquarks, usually one of each, bound together by the strong interaction. Because mesons are composed of quark subparticles, they have a meaningful physical size, a diameter of roughly one femtometre (10−15 m),[1] which is about 0.6 times the size of a proton or neutron. All mesons are unstable, with the longest-lived lasting for only a few tenths of a nanosecond. Heavier mesons decay to lighter mesons and ultimately to stable electrons, neutrinos and photons.
Outside the nucleus, mesons appear in nature only as short-lived products of very high-energy collisions between particles made of quarks, such as cosmic rays (high-energy protons and neutrons) and baryonic matter. Mesons are routinely produced artificially in cyclotrons or other particle accelerators in the collisions of protons, antiprotons, or other particles.
Higher-energy (more massive) mesons were created momentarily in the Big Bang, but are not thought to play a role in nature today. However, such heavy mesons are regularly created in particle accelerator experiments that explore the nature of the heavier quarks that compose the heavier mesons.
Mesons are part of the hadron particle family, which are defined simply as particles composed of two or more quarks. The other members of the hadron family are the baryons: subatomic particles composed of odd numbers of valence quarks (at least 3), and some experiments show evidence of exotic mesons, which do not have the conventional valence quark content of two quarks (one quark and one antiquark), but 4 or more.
Because quarks have a spin 1/2, the difference in quark number between mesons and baryons results in conventional two-quark mesons being bosons, whereas baryons are fermions.
Each type of meson has a corresponding antiparticle (antimeson) in which quarks are replaced by their corresponding antiquarks and vice versa. For example, a positive pion (
π+
) is made of one up quark and one down antiquark; and its corresponding antiparticle, the negative pion (
π−
), is made of one up antiquark and one down quark.
Because mesons are composed of quarks, they participate in both the weak interaction and strong interaction. Mesons with net electric charge also participate in the electromagnetic interaction. Mesons are classified according to their quark content, total angular momentum, parity and various other properties, such as C-parity and G-parity. Although no meson is stable, those of lower mass are nonetheless more stable than the more massive, and hence are easier to observe and study in particle accelerators or in cosmic ray experiments. The lightest group of mesons is less massive than the lightest group of baryons, meaning that they are more easily produced in experiments, and thus exhibit certain higher-energy phenomena more readily than do baryons. But mesons can be quite massive: for example, the J/Psi meson (
J/ψ
) containing the charm quark, first seen 1974, is about three times as massive as a proton, and the upsilon meson (
ϒ
) containing the bottom quark, first seen in 1977, is about ten times as massive.
The quark content of a proton. The color assignment of individual quarks is arbitrary, but all three colors must be present. Forces between quarks are mediated by gluons.
**
Proton
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton
A proton is a stable subatomic particle, symbol p, H+, or 1H+ with a positive electric charge of +1 e (elementary charge). Its mass is slightly less than that of a neutron and 1,836 times the mass of an electron (the proton-to-electron mass ratio). Protons and neutrons, each with masses of approximately one atomic mass unit, are jointly referred to as “nucleons” (particles present in atomic nuclei).
One or more protons are present in the nucleus of every atom. They provide the attractive electrostatic central force that binds the atomic electrons. The number of protons in the nucleus is the defining property of an element, and is referred to as the atomic number (represented by the symbol Z). Since each element has a unique number of protons, each element has its own unique atomic number, which determines the number of atomic electrons and consequently the chemical characteristics of the element.
The word proton is Greek for “first”, and this name was given to the hydrogen nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1920. In previous years, Rutherford had discovered that the hydrogen nucleus (known to be the lightest nucleus) could be extracted from the nuclei of nitrogen by atomic collisions. Protons were therefore a candidate to be a fundamental or elementary particle, and hence a building block of nitrogen and all other heavier atomic nuclei.
Although protons were originally considered to be elementary particles, in the modern Standard Model of particle physics, protons are now known to be composite particles, containing three valence quarks, and together with neutrons are now classified as hadrons. Protons are composed of two up quarks of charge +(2/3)e and one down quark of charge −(1/3)e. The rest masses of quarks contribute only about 1% of a proton’s mass. The remainder of a proton’s mass is due to quantum chromodynamics binding energy, which includes the kinetic energy of the quarks and the energy of the gluon fields that bind the quarks together. Because protons are not fundamental particles, they possess a measurable size; the root mean square charge radius of a proton is about 0.84–0.87 fm (1 fm = 10−15 m). In 2019, two different studies, using different techniques, found this radius to be 0.833 fm, with an uncertainty of ±0.010 fm.
Free protons occur occasionally on Earth: thunderstorms can produce protons with energies of up to several tens of MeV. At sufficiently low temperatures and kinetic energies, free protons will bind to electrons. However, the character of such bound protons does not change, and they remain protons. A fast proton moving through matter will slow by interactions with electrons and nuclei, until it is captured by the electron cloud of an atom. The result is a protonated atom, which is a chemical compound of hydrogen. In a vacuum, when free electrons are present, a sufficiently slow proton may pick up a single free electron, becoming a neutral hydrogen atom, which is chemically a free radical. Such “free hydrogen atoms” tend to react chemically with many other types of atoms at sufficiently low energies. When free hydrogen atoms react with each other, they form neutral hydrogen molecules (H2), which are the most common molecular component of molecular clouds in interstellar space.
Free protons are routinely used for accelerators for proton therapy or various particle physics experiments, with the most powerful example being the Large Hadron Collider.
The quark content of an antiproton. The color assignment of individual quarks is arbitrary, but all three colors must be present. Forces between quarks are mediated by gluons.
**
Antiproton
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiproton
The antiproton is the antiparticle of the proton. Antiprotons are stable, but they are typically short-lived, since any collision with a proton will cause both particles to be annihilated in a burst of energy.
The existence of the antiproton with electric charge of −1 e, opposite to the electric charge of +1 e of the proton, was predicted by Paul Dirac in his 1933 Nobel Prize lecture.
The antiproton was first experimentally confirmed in 1955 at the Bevatron particle accelerator by University of California, Berkeley physicists Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain.
The properties of the antiproton that have been measured all match the corresponding properties of the proton, with the exception that the antiproton has electric charge and magnetic moment that are the opposites of those in the proton, which is to be expected from the antimatter equivalent of a proton. The questions of how matter is different from antimatter, and the relevance of antimatter in explaining how our universe survived the Big Bang, remain open problems—open, in part, due to the relative scarcity of antimatter in today’s universe.
Antiprotons have been detected in cosmic rays beginning in 1979, first by balloon-borne experiments and more recently by satellite-based detectors. The standard picture for their presence in cosmic rays is that they are produced in collisions of cosmic ray protons with atomic nuclei in the interstellar medium, via the reaction. Their energy spectrum is modified by collisions with other atoms in the interstellar medium, and antiprotons can also be lost by “leaking out” of the galaxy.
The antiproton cosmic ray energy spectrum is now measured reliably and is consistent with this standard picture of antiproton production by cosmic ray collisions. These experimental measurements set upper limits on the number of antiprotons that could be produced in exotic ways, such as from annihilation of supersymmetric dark matter particles in the galaxy or from the Hawking radiation caused by the evaporation of primordial black holes. This also provides a lower limit on the antiproton lifetime of about 1–10 million years. Since the galactic storage time of antiprotons is about 10 million years, an intrinsic decay lifetime would modify the galactic residence time and distort the spectrum of cosmic ray antiprotons.
The magnitude of properties of the antiproton are predicted by CPT symmetry to be exactly related to those of the proton. In particular, CPT symmetry predicts the mass and lifetime of the antiproton to be the same as those of the proton, and the electric charge and magnetic moment of the antiproton to be opposite in sign and equal in magnitude to those of the proton. CPT symmetry is a basic consequence of quantum field theory and no violations of it have ever been detected.