After a really busy summer, I'm back with another physics blog post. This time it is about the Standard Model. This model is theory that tries to explain 3 of the fundamental interactions: electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear by using gauge bosons. The five types of gauge bosons are gluons, W+, W- and Z bosons and photons. It also contains 24 fundamental particles, formed of 12 particles and their anti-particles. The particles are then divided into quarks and leptons. The quark particles are up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange. They all have fractional charges which are +2/3 for up, charm and top quarks while down, strange and bottom quarks have -1/3 charge.
Leptons are electron, muon, tau and the corresponding neutrino for each of them (electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino). These particles all have integer charges: the electron, muon and tau particles have -1 charge while the neutrinos have 0 charge.
These particles are all subatomic and are believed to be indivisible so are essentially the building blocks of the universe. For example, the much more well known proton is made up two up quarks and one down quark (2/3+2/3-1/3) so has an overall charge of +1. Another property of these 12 particles is that they have a property called spin.
Spin is a natural form of angular momentum that these elementary particles have and is measured in Nms. However, the value (1/2) assigned to these 12 particles is called the spin quantum number which is calculated by dividing the actual spin angular momentum by the reduced Planck constant
(6.582119514(40) X 10^(-16)eVs).
One type of building block that hadn't been confirmed until relatively recently (4th July 2012) and this was the Higgs Boson, theorised by Peter Higgs in 1964.
Leptons are electron, muon, tau and the corresponding neutrino for each of them (electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino). These particles all have integer charges: the electron, muon and tau particles have -1 charge while the neutrinos have 0 charge.
These particles are all subatomic and are believed to be indivisible so are essentially the building blocks of the universe. For example, the much more well known proton is made up two up quarks and one down quark (2/3+2/3-1/3) so has an overall charge of +1. Another property of these 12 particles is that they have a property called spin.
Spin is a natural form of angular momentum that these elementary particles have and is measured in Nms. However, the value (1/2) assigned to these 12 particles is called the spin quantum number which is calculated by dividing the actual spin angular momentum by the reduced Planck constant
(6.582119514(40) X 10^(-16)eVs).
One type of building block that hadn't been confirmed until relatively recently (4th July 2012) and this was the Higgs Boson, theorised by Peter Higgs in 1964.
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