Elementary Particles and Their Classification
The smallest building blocks of matter, the forces between them, and the surprising wave nature they hide.
Big Idea: An elementary particle is a piece of matter that, as far as we know, is not made of anything smaller. Electrons, quarks and photons are elementary; a proton is not, because it is built from quarks. All the substance of the world — and all the forces acting between its parts — can be described with a short list of elementary particles and just four fundamental interactions.
By the end you will be able to:
- say what makes a particle elementary and give examples,
- sort particles into fermions (matter) and bosons (force carriers), and into leptons, quarks and hadrons,
- name the four fundamental interactions and their carriers,
- explain antiparticles and annihilation,
- use the de Broglie relation λ = h/(mv) to find the wavelength of a particle.