Subatomic particle

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. As physicists use the term, the meaning of the word "particle" is one which understands how particles are radically different at the quantum-level, and rather different from the common understanding of the term.

The idea of a particle is one which had to undergo serious rethinking in light of experiments which showed that that the smallest particles (of light) could behave just like waves. The difference is indeed vast, and required the new concept of wave-particle duality to state that quantum-scale "particles" are understood to behave in a way which resembles both particles and waves. Another new concept, the uncertainty principle, meant that analyzing particles at these scales required a statistical approach. All of these factors combined such that the very notion of a discrete "particle" has been ultimately replaced by the concept of something like wave-packet of an uncertain boundary, whose properties are only known as probabilities, and whose interactions with other "particles" remain largely a mystery, even 80 years after quantum mechanics was established.

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 Duality Paradox. ^[1].

Particles are discrete, their energy is centralized into what appears to be a finite space, which possesses absolute boundaries and its contents we contemplate to be homogenous i.e. the same at any point within the particle. Particles subsist at a particular location. If they are demonstrated on a 3D graph, they have x, y, and z coordinates. They can never exist in more than one location at once, and to travel to a different place in space, a particle must move to it under the laws of kinematics, acceleration, velocity and so forth. ^[2]

Interactions between particles have been scrutinized for many centuries, and a few simple laws underpin how particles proceed in collisions and interactions. The most angelic of these are the quarks^[3]. These are the prerequisite basics of Newtonian mechanics, a series of statements and equations in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica originally published in 1687.

Dividing an atom

The study of nucleon denotes both the neutron and the proton.

Electrons, which are negatively charged, have a mass of 1/1836 of a mass number of a nucleus counts the total number of nucleons.

cosmic rays, sometimes particle physics is also called high energy physics.

History

J. J. Thomson discovered cosmic rays.

The development of new particle accelerators and particle detectors in the 1950s led to the discovery of a huge variety of 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.

Visualisation

In 2000 a group of scientists from University of Michigan joined forces with designer Jan-Henrik Andersen with a goal "to nurture a future consensus on how to visually represent subatomic particle energy and matter". They resulted in a project "Sized Matter: perception of the extreme unseen" where series of particles such as photon and some atomic events were depicted possibly closely to what is 'natural'.

References

1. ^ Einstein, Albert; Robert W. Lawson (1920). Relativity: The Special & General Theory. New York Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 1-58734-092-5. 
2. ^ Laws of Kinematics
3. ^ Isaac Newton - Newton's Laws of Motion (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica). 1687.

See also

• Poincare symmetry, CPT invariance, spin statistics theorem, fermions.
• Particle physics, quark model and the standard model.