Physics: Subatomic Particles Flashcards
In converse to electrons, neutrons, and protons, a quark is a what?
Elementary particle
Can quarks be found in isolation?
No
What is a hadron?
Any composite particle made of quarks held together by the strong force.
What is a meson?
A composite particle (hadron) made up of a quark and an anti-quark.
What is a baryon?
A composite particle (hadron) made up of three quarks. Protons and neutrons are baryons.
A proton is composed of what three quarks?
Two “up” quarks and one “down” quark; color is arbitrary, but all three colors must be present.
What is color confinement?
The phenomenon that as a result of being color charged, quarks cannot be found in isolation.
An electron is what kind of elementary particle?
Lepton
What are the 6 types of quarks and what are their charges?
Up (+2/3) Charm (+2/3) Top (+2/3)
Down (-1/3) Strange (-1/3) Bottom (-1/3)
What are the spin values for all 6 types of quarks?
1/2
What is a lepton?
An elementary particle with 1/2 spin that does not undergo strong interactions. Two types: charged (electrons) and neutral (neutrinos).
LHC
Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN
Antimatter has the same mass, lifetime, and spin as their corresponding matter particles. What is different?
The signs of charges are reversed.
Name some antimatter particles.
Positron, antiproton, etc. Any antiparticle is denoted by a bar over the symbol; an up quark (u) becomes an antiup quark (ū). Alternately, it can be denoted by the charge.
What is a fermion?
A particle with fractional spin. A particle that obeys Fermi-Dirac statistics and the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
