Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Subatomic particles

What are subatomic particles?

subatomic particles are the materials that make up atoms or things even smaller than that like protons and neutrons and quarks. Some are:

    nuetrinos,

    higgs boson,

    z and w boson,

    photons,

    and pi-meson (pion)

Because the most high powered microscope can only see atoms, the things inside the atom are estimated.

What are quarks?

Quarks are subatomic particles that make up subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, pi-meson,etc. There are six types of quarks which are up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange quarks

The size of the quarks aren't relevant but the masses are

What quarks make up certain things?

Protons consist of one down quark and two up quarks while neutrons consist of one up quark. Pions consist of one up quark and one down anti-quark.

What is a Higgs boson?

Higgs Boson is a recently discovered particle, and when other particles pass through the Higgs Boson, they gain mass. Peter Higgs and François Englert helped discover this new particle. The Higgs Boson particle is a type of boson particle with no spin, charge, or color charge. It is very unstable and immediately decays into other particles. On July 4, 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Hadron collider announced that had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 126 GeV. On October 8, 2013 Peter Higgs and François Englert won the Peace Prize because of the dicovery of the Higgs Boson particle.

What is a Pi-meson?

Pi-meson is long for pion (but pion is also an insult!). Pions that are negatively charged and pions that are positively charged only last 26 nanoseconds and ones that are neutrally charged last less than that. Neutral pions decay into gamma rays while charged pions tend to decay into muons and muon neutrinos. Pions that are made up one down quark and on anti-up quark are negatively charged. Pions that are made up of one up quark and one anti-down quark are positively charged. Pions that are made up of one up quark and one up anti-quark or one down quark and one down anti-quark are neutrally charged.

Now that that you know some things about subatomic particles what is you favorite subatomic particle?