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ShareParticle physics is a branch of physics that studies the elementary constituents of matter and radiation, and the interactions between them.
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It is also called "high energy physics", because many elementary particles do not occur under normal circumstances in nature, but can be created and detected during energetic collisions of other particles, as is done in particle accelerators.
Modern particle physics research is focused on subatomic particles, which have less structure than atoms.
These include atomic constituents such as electrons, protons, and neutrons (protons and neutrons are actually composite particles, made up of quarks), particles produced by radiative and scattering processes, such as photons, neutrinos, and muons, as well as a wide range of exotic particles.
Strictly speaking, the term particle is a misnomer because the dynamics of particle physics are governed by quantum mechanics.
As such, they exhibit wave-particle duality, displaying particle-like behavior under certain experimental conditions and wave-like behavior in others (more technically they are described by state vectors in a Hilbert space).
All the particles and their interactions observed to date can be described by a quantum field theory called the Standard Model.
The Standard Model has 40 species of elementary particles (24 fermions, 12 vector bosons, and 4 scalars), which can combine to form composite particles, accounting for the hundreds of other species of particles discovered since the 1960s.
For more information about the topic Particle physics, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:
Subatomic particle — A subatomic particle is a particle smaller than an atom: it may be elementary or composite. Particle physics and nuclear physics concern themselves ... > read more
Proton — The proton is a subatomic particle with an electric charge of one positive fundamental unit and a mass of 938.3 MeV/c2, or about 1836 times the mass ... > read more
Spin (physics) — In physics, spin refers to the angular momentum intrinsic to a body, as opposed to orbital angular momentum, which is generated by the motion of its ... > read more
Electron — The Electron is a fundamental subatomic particle that carries an electric charge. It is a spin-half lepton that participates in electromagnetic ... > read more
Quantum number — A quantum number describes the energies of electrons in atoms. Each quantum number specifies the value of a conserved quantity in the dynamics of the ... > read more
Nuclear reaction — In nuclear physics, a nuclear reaction is a process in which two nuclei or nuclear particles collide, to produce different products than the initial ... > read more
Quark — Quarks are one of the two basic constituents of matter in the Standard Model of particle physics. (The others are leptons.) Antiparticles of quarks ... > read more
Particle accelerator — A particle accelerator is a device that uses electric fields to propel electrically charged particles to high speeds and magnetic fields to contain ... > read moreRecommend this page on Facebook, Twitter,
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