On a pleasant discovery The discovery of the fourth kind of quarks named charmed (or c) quark in 1974 has suggested this isn’t all and reinforced the belief that there should be at least two another kinds of heavy quarks … Continue reading
Category Archives: Elementary particles
About the adventures of a hadron in matter Initially the hadron will fly in the substance without incident, just ripping electrons from orbits on its way if this is a charged hadron, such as a proton or pion. But when … Continue reading
On the difficulties a lonely lepton In conversions of elementary particles into each other, the total electric charge of the particles before conversion is equal to that after. If electrons, muons, tau-leptons or neutrinos are involved in the conversion, similarly … Continue reading
About sophisticated stuffing of elementary particle with a hadron charge inside Well, at first they thought protons and neutrons that make up nuclei of atoms of matter are indivisible particles. That’s why they call them fundamental, but when in 1968 … Continue reading
How leptons and quarks got mass and began to actively interact The Higgs boson is responsible for the masses of quarks, leptons and intermediate bosons involved in weak interactions of elementary particles — it was specifically introduced into the theory … Continue reading
The road to excellence in understanding of the universe More than 45 years ago, the theory of electroweak interaction of elementary particles was created, which then got a detailed experimental confirmation and the name of the Standard Model. The Higgs … Continue reading
On fermion’s problems, when all the low-energy states are already occupied If we neglect the possibility of turning them into particles of another sort, a quantity of identical particles can represent the ideal gas, where the range of particle’s speeds … Continue reading
Some ignore the neighbors, others interact with everyone Firstly, a large group is distinguished among the particles, which is called leptons. The leptons interact very weakly with other particles. This applies particularly to the lightest lepton neutrino that, unlike others, … Continue reading
How all the baryons except protons broke apart in the universe As there are no baryons lighter than a proton, its baryon charge would disappear if it decayed. For this reason, the proton lifetime is immeasurably greater than that of … Continue reading
These different rhythms in different fundamental interactions Fundamental interactions of particles have little or no resemblance to each other. The strong interaction affects only hadrons — particles made of quarks. In the weak interaction, in addition to quarks, other particles … Continue reading
Flying without experiencing fundamental interactions… All elementary particles experience the gravitational attraction, but this is insignificant in the background of forces of the other three types of interactions: strong, electromagnetic and weak. These interactions affect the motion of particles when … Continue reading
How lucky we are that in a changing world there is a stable proton… As we know, atomic nuclei of substance consist of nucleons — protons and neutrons. If the nucleons decay to other, lighter elementary particles, those will quickly … Continue reading