Glance of

Particle &
Quantum
Physics

Pauli exclusion principle

o The Pauli exclusion principle is the quantum mechanical principle that
says that two identical fermions (particles with half-integer spin) cannot
occupy the same quantum state simultaneously.
o In the case of electrons, it can be stated as follows: it is impossible for two
electrons of a poly-electron atom to have the same values of the
four quantum numbers (n, , m and ms). For two electrons residing in the
same orbital, n, , and m are the same, so ms must be different and
the electrons have opposite spins.

FermiDirac statistics
o FermiDirac statistics describes a distribution of particles over energy
states in systems consisting of many identical particles that obey the Pauli
exclusion principle. FermiDirac (FD) statistics applies to identical
particles with half-integer spin in a system in thermodynamic equilibrium.
o Additionally, the particles in this system are assumed to have negligible
mutual interaction.
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F-D Distribution

BoseEinstein statistics
o In quantum statistics, BoseEinstein statistics (or more colloquially BE
statistics) is one of two possible ways in which a collection of noninteracting indistinguishable particles may occupy a set of available
discrete energy states, at thermodynamic equilibrium.
o The aggregation of particles in the same state, which is a characteristic of
particles obeying BoseEinstein statistics, accounts for the cohesive
streaming of laser light and the frictionless creeping of superfluid helium.
o The theory of this behavior was developed (192425) by Satyendra Nath
Bose, who recognized that a collection of identical and indistinguishable
particles can be distributed in this way. The idea was later adopted and
extended by Albert Einstein in collaboration with Bose.
o At low temperatures, bosons behave differently from fermions (which obey
the FermiDirac statistics) in a way that an unlimited number of them can
"condense" into the same energy state.
o This apparently unusual property also gives rise to the special state of
matter Bose Einstein Condensate.
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B-E Distribution

Field Particles
o In terms of the exchange of entities (e.g forces) called field particles or
exchange particles. Field particles are also called gauge bosons.
o The emission of a field particle by one particle and its absorption by
another manifests as a force between the two interacting particles.
o In the case of the electromagnetic interaction, for instance the
electromagnetic force is said to be mediated by photons, hence photons
are the field particles of the electromagnetic field.
o Likewise, the nuclear force is mediated by field particles called gluons.

Feynman diagram representing a photon

mediating the electromagnetic force between
two electrons.

Particles in Physics
Standard Model

Particles in Physics
Elementary particles in the Standard Model

Particles in Physics
Elementary particles in the Standard Model

Particles in Physics
Compound Subatomic particles

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Hadron

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Particles in Physics

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Particles in Physics

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Particles in Physics (Generation based)

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Standard Model of Elementary Particles

The 12 fundamental fermions and 4 fundamental bosons. Six of the particles in
the Standard Model are quarks (shown in purple). Each of the first three columns
forms a generation of matter.

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List of particles
The most prominent types of particles found or believed to exist in the
universe are:

Elementary particles
Fermions
Quarks
Lepton

Bosons
Hypothetical particles

Composite particles
Hadrons (Particles made of Quarks)
Baryons (Three valance quarks)
Mesons (One Valence quark & One Anti quark)

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Elementary particles
o Elementary particles are the fundamental objects of quantum field theory
particles with no measurable internal structure; that is, they are not made up
or composed of other particles.
o Elementary particles are classified according to their spin.
o Fermions have half-integer spin while bosons have integer spin.
o All the particles of the Standard Model have been experimentally observed.
o Recently discovered the Higgs boson which has zero spin.

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Fermions
Fermion particles are described by FermiDirac statistics and have quantum
numbers described by the Pauli exclusion principle.
Fermions have half-integer spin which is a number of the form (n + 1\2),
where n is an integer. For example, 4, 7/2, 13/2, 8.5.
Fermions include the Quarks and Leptons as well as any Composite
Particle made of these, such as all Baryons, Mesons are called Composite
Fermion.
All known fermions are also Dirac fermions; that is, each known fermion
has its own distinct antiparticle.
Fermions are the basic building blocks of all matter. In the Standard Model,
there are 12 types of elementary fermions: six quarks and six leptons.
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Fermions (Quark)
A quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent
of matter.
Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most
stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic
nuclei.
Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never
directly observed or found in isolation; they can be found only within
hadrons, such as baryons (of which protons and neutrons are examples),
and mesons.
There are six types of quarks, known as flavors:
up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom.

A proton, composed of two up quarks, one down quark and

the gluons "binding" them together. The color assignment of individual
quarks is not important, only that all three colors be present.

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Fermions (Quark)
Quarks
have
various
intrinsic
properties,
including electric
charge, mass, color charge and spin. Quarks are the only elementary
particles in the Standard Model of particle physics to experience all
four fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces
(electromagnetism, gravitation, strong interaction, and weak interaction),
as well as the only known particles whose electric charges are
not integer multiples of the elementary charge.
Like Antiparticles in general, antiquarks have the same mass, mean
lifetime, and spin as their respective quarks, but the electric charge and
other charges have the opposite sign.
Quarks are spin-12 particles, implying that they are fermions according to
the spin-statistics theorem.
Quarks are subject to the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that no
two identical fermions can simultaneously occupy the same quantum
state.
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Strong interaction and color charge

o According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), quarks
possess a property called color charge.
o There are three types of color charge, arbitrarily
labeled blue, green, and red. Each of them is complemented
by an anticolor antiblue, antigreen, and antired.
o Every quark carries a color, while every antiquark carries
an anticolor.
o The system of attraction and repulsion between quarks
charged with different combinations of the three colors is
called strong interaction, which is mediated by force
carrying particles known as gluons.
o The theory that describes strong interactions
called quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

is
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Multicolored Quarks
o Shortly after the concept of quarks was proposed, scientists recognized that
certain particles had quark compositions that violated the exclusion
principle.
o The principle is more general, however, and applies to all particles with halfintegral spin (etc.), which are collectively called fermions.
o Because all quarks are fermions having spin 1/2, they are expected to follow
the exclusion principle.
o One example of a particle that appears to violate the exclusion principle is
the (sss) baryon, which contains three strange quarks having parallel
spins, giving it a total spin of 3/2.
o All three quarks have the same spin quantum number, in violation of the
exclusion principle.
o Other examples of baryons made up of identical quarks having parallel spins
are the ++ (uuu) and the -- (ddd).
o To resolve this problem, it was suggested that quarks possess an additional
property called color charge.
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Multicolored Quarks
o This property is similar in many respects to electric charge except that it
occurs in six varieties rather than two.
o The colors assigned to quarks are red, green, and blue, and antiquarks have
the colors antired, antigreen, and antiblue.
o Therefore, the colors red, green, and blue serve as the quantum numbers
for the color of the quark.
o To satisfy the exclusion principle, the three quarks in any baryon must all
have different colors.
(a) A green quark is attracted to an
antigreen quark. This forms a meson
whose quark structure is (qq).
(b) Three quarks of different colors
attract one another to form a
baryon.
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Strong interaction and color charge

The pattern of strong

charges for the three
colors of quark, three
antiquarks, and eight
gluons (with two of zero
charge overlapping)

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Color confinement
Color confinement, often simply called confinement, is the phenomenon
that color charged particles (such as quarks) cannot be isolated singularly,
and therefore cannot be directly observed.
Quarks, by default, clump together to form groups, or hadrons.
The two types of hadrons are the mesons (one quark, one antiquark) and
the baryons (three quarks).

An animation of color confinement.

Energy is supplied to the quarks, and
the gluon tube elongates until it
reaches a point where it "snaps" and
forms a quark-antiquark pair.

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Electric charge of Nucleons

Quarks have fractional electric charge values either -13 or 23 times
the elementary charge, depending on flavor.
Up, charm, and top quarks (collectively referred to as up-type quarks) have a
charge of +23, while down, strange, and bottom quarks (down-type quarks)
have 13.
Antiquarks have the opposite charge to their corresponding quarks; up-type
antiquarks have charges of 23 and down-type antiquarks have charges of
+13.
Since the electric charge of a hadron is the sum of the charges of the
constituent quarks, all hadrons have integer charges: the combination of
three quarks (baryons), three antiquarks (antibaryons), or a quark and an
antiquark (mesons) always results in integer charges.
For example, the hadron constituents of atomic nuclei, neutrons and protons,
have charges of 0 and +1 respectively; the neutron is composed of two down
quarks and one up quark, and the proton of two up quarks and one down
quark.
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Spin
Spin is an intrinsic form of angular momentum carried by elementary
particles, the other form is orbital angular momentum.
It is sometimes visualized as the rotation of an object around its own axis
(hence the name "spin").
Although this spin notion is somewhat misguided at subatomic scales
because elementary particles are believed to be point-like.
Spin can be represented by a vector whose length is measured in units of
the reduced Planck constant (pronounced "h bar").
For quarks, a measurement of the spin vector component along any axis can
only yield the values +/2 or /2; for this reason quarks are classified
as spin +12 particles,
The component of spin along a given axis by convention the z axis is often
denoted by an up arrow for the value +12 and down arrow for the value
12, placed after the symbol for flavor.
For example, an up quark with a spin of +12 along the z axis is denoted by
u.
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Spin
The conventional definition of the spin quantum number (s), is s = n/2,
where n can be any non-negative integer. Hence the allowed values of s are
0, 1/2, 1, 3/2, 2, etc.
The spin angular momentum (S), of any physical system is quantized.
The allowed values of S are:

A single point in space can spin continuously without becoming tangled. Notice that
after a 360 degree rotation, the spiral flips between clockwise and counterclockwise
orientations. It returns to its original configuration after spinning a full 720 degrees.
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Mesons
Mesons are hadronic subatomic particles composed of one quark and
one antiquark, bound together by the strong interaction.
Because mesons are composed of sub-particles, they have a physical size,
with a diameter roughly one femtometre, which is about 23 the size of
a proton or neutron. Examples of mesons include the pion and kaon.
All mesons are unstable, with the longest-lived lasting for only a few
hundredths of a microsecond.
Mesons are not produced by radioactive decay, but appear in nature only as
short-lived products of very high-energy interactions in matter between
particles made of quarks. Mesons are also frequently produced artificially in
high-energy particle accelerators that collide protons, anti-protons, or other
particles.
In nature, the importance of lighter mesons is that they are the associated
quantum-field particles that transmit the nuclear force, in the same way that
photons are the particles that transmit the electromagnetic force.
Because mesons have spin of 0 or 1 and are not themselves elementary
particles, they are "composite" bosons.
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Boson
In quantum mechanics, a boson is a particle that follows BoseEinstein
statistics.
The name boson was coined by Paul Dirac to commemorate the contribution
of the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose in developing, with
Einstein, BoseEinstein statisticswhich theorizes the characteristics of
elementary particles.
Examples of bosons include fundamental particles such as photons, gluons,
and W & Z bosons the Higgs boson, and the still-theoretical graviton of
quantum gravity; composite particles (e.g. mesons); & some quasiparticles
(e.g. Cooper pairs, plasmons, and phonons).

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Boson
An important characteristic of bosons is that their statistics do not restrict the
number of them that occupy the same quantum state.
This property is exemplified by helium-4 when it is cooled to become
a superfluid.
The elementary bosons are force carriers that function as the 'glue' holding
matter together. This property holds for all particles with integer spin (s = 0,
1, 2 etc.) as a consequence of the spinstatistics theorem.
The fundamental forces of nature are mediated by gauge bosons, and mass is
believed to be created by the Higgs Field.

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CERN

Tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for
Nuclear Research ((French: Organisation europenne pour la recherche nuclaire),
known as CERN) with all the Magnets and Instruments. The shown part of the
tunnel is located under the LHC P8, near the LHCb.
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Antiparticle
o Corresponding
to
most
kinds
of particles,
there
is
an
associated antiparticle with the same mass and opposite charge (including
electric charge).
o For example, the antiparticle of the electron is the positively charged
electron, or positron, which is produced naturally in certain types
of radioactive decay.
o The laws of nature are very nearly symmetrical with respect to particles and
antiparticles. For example, an antiproton and a positron
can form
an antihydrogen atom, which is believed to have the same properties as
a hydrogen atom.
o Particle-antiparticle pairs can annihilate each other, producing photons; since
the charges of the particle and antiparticle are opposite, total charge is
conserved.
o For example, the positrons produced in natural radioactive decay quickly
annihilate themselves with electrons, producing pairs of gamma rays, a
process exploited in positron emission tomography.
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Antiparticle
o Although particles and their antiparticles have opposite charges, electrically
neutral particles need not be identical to their antiparticles.
o The
neutron,
for
example,
is
made
out
of quarks,
the antineutron from antiquarks, and they are distinguishable from one
another because neutrons and antineutrons annihilate each other upon
contact. However, other neutral particles are their own antiparticles, such as
photons and the hypothetical gravitons.

Illustration of electric charge of particles (left)

and antiparticles (right). From top to
bottom; electron/positron, proton/antiproton,
neutron/antineutron.

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Gluon
Gluons are elementary particles that act as the exchange particles (or gauge
bosons) for the strong force between quarks, analogous to the exchange
of photons in the electromagnetic force between two charged particles.
In technical terms, gluons are vector gauge bosons that mediate strong
interactions of quarks in quantum chromodynamics (QCD).
Gluons themselves carry the color charge of the strong interaction. This is
unlike the photon, which mediates the electromagnetic interaction but lacks
an electric charge.
Gluons therefore participate in the strong interaction in addition to mediating
it, making QCD significantly harder to analyze than QED (quantum
electrodynamics).
A Feynman diagram showing
the radiation of a gluon when
an electron and positron are
annihilated.
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Higgs boson
The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is an elementary particle in the Standard
Model of particle physics. Its main relevance is that it allows scientists to
explore the Higgs field a fundamental field first suspected to exist in the
1960s that unlike the more familiar electromagnetic field cannot be "turned
off", but instead takes a non-zero constant value almost everywhere. The
presence of this field now believed to be confirmed explains why some
fundamental particles have mass even though the symmetries controlling
their interactions should require them to be massless, and also answers
several other long-standing puzzles in physics, such as the reason the weak
force has a much shorter range than the electromagnetic force.
Despite being present everywhere, the existence of the Higgs field is very
hard to confirm. It can be detected through its excitations (i.e. Higgs
particles), but these are extremely hard to produce and detect. the particle
had been proven to behave, interact and decay in many of the ways
predicted by the Standard Model, and was also tentatively confirmed to have
positive parity and zero spin, two fundamental attributes of a Higgs boson.
This appears to be the first elementary scalar particle discovered in nature
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Hypothetical particles
Supersymmetric theories predict the existence of more particles, none of
which have been confirmed experimentally as of 2014

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Other Hypothetical particles

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Classification of Particles by speed

A tardyon or bradyon travels slower than light and has a non-zero rest
mass.
A luxon travels at the speed of light and has no rest mass.
A tachyon is a hypothetical particle that travels faster than the speed of light
and has an imaginary rest mass.

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