The Standard Model for dummies!

Hi,
last time I talked about some stuff like dark matter (1 & 2), dark energy and I did not explain a lot of things which I mentioned and this time I will talk about Standard Model.

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Standard model or Standard model of particles and interaction is the model of all observed and proved particles.

The next picture shows how it looks like, you could say that it is the “modern” periodic table or some kind of holy grail of physics.

So in this standard model you have particles that make up everything we know [1].

There are four main groups which are sorted by the forces they interact with.

All of those particles interact with gravity. Quarks also interact through strong nuclear force while leptons do not interact that way, also all of them have whole numbers for charge.

The red part has inside particles which are what is called “force carriers” they carry the fundamental forces with graviton excluded because he is not proven yet.

The most mysterious is the yellow part with only Higgs boson inside, I will make sure to make a whole chapter only about it.

Quarks

Already months and months ago I made post about quarks. Here I will cut it short so, quarks are particles that made everything there is except just a little part which is made from electrons. Quarks normally group together into hadrons – protons, neutrons, pions. Quarks have charge of either +2/3 or -1/3. They also have a property called color which is not color at all and they must group together so their colors cancel into white (white) [2].

Leptons

There are three main particles called: electrons, muons and tauons. Only electrons are actually somewhere while we can create other in the particle accelerator.

All of those have -1 charge but there are other particles called neutrinos. Electrons, muons and tauons all have their neutrino.

I already wrote about neutrinos but they are actually extremely light particles sometimes called “ghost” particles because they can easily go through whole planet Earth without touching anything. They are also electrically neutral.

Force carriers

Gluons are particles that are mass less and they carry the strong nuclear force.
Photons are also mass less and they carry electromagnetism.
Gauge bosons (W+- and Z) carry weak nuclear force.

Most of those particles have mass and that is because of Higgs boson, but that is whole new story which I will have to start with symmetries and fields, stay tuned.

Also main difference between force carriers and everything else is that they do not need any space to exist, there can be millions of them at one spot while only one lepton or quark.

Dragallur

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[1] I do not talk about dark matter which I mentioned in earlier posts. WIMPs are not here since they do not belong into standard model, those are particles beyond the model even if they exist.

[2] Quarks have 3 basic colors: Red, Green and Blue but there are of course anti quarks which have just opposite colors: Antired, Antigreen and antiblue.

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4) Particles: Hyperons

Hi,
I will talk about hyperons. Hyperons are not fundamental particles because they are made up by quarks, like neutrons or protons.
(to see what are quarks check this post: https://dragallur.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/3-particles-quarks/)
They are in the group of hadrons. It is group of particles that are made up by quarks so in this group are also Pions which are in the smaller group of mesons.
Btw. mesons are particles that are made up by pair of quark-antiquark.
While hyperons are in the group of baryons = particles with three quarks.

So the strange thing about them is that they have to have one strange quark so they can be hyperons. The most “common” one is similar to proton or neutron because he is made up of up, down and strange quark and he is called Lambda. There are twelve of them with different combinations of those three quarks, one of them, Omega has only strange quarks.

Ok, thats about it. They have also attribute of really fast decaying because strange quark is not very stable so they can not be found except in Hyperon stars. Those are heavier neutron stars in which hyperons wont decay because they have no space and gravity will hold them.

Dragallur

3) Particles: Quarks

Hi,
I have been writing about quarks a lot so now I would like to shortly summarize what they are.
Quarks have been discovered when scientists saw that paths of particles traveling close to neutron are distorted by some weak electromagnetic field. Then they discovered that neutron is neutral but it contains particles which are not neutral: quarks.

If I told you that protons and neutrons are only made up of three up and down quarks  you could easily figure out what is inside them. Proton´s charge is +1 which means there has to be 2 ups and 1 down because UP(charge)=+2/3 DOWN(charge)=-1/3 === 2*2/3+(-1/3)=+1. While neutron is made up of two downs and one up which equals to 0.
As you can see from the table there are six types (flavors) of quarks. I talked only about two of them because they are much more common then charm, strange, top and bottom. The reason why those four are less common is that they are extremely heavy compared to up and down quarks and they will decay into up and downs. Up and downs can not decay to anything which makes them stable. Even then it is thought that proton (uud) can decay.. I talked about it earlier so you can check my other posts.

Flavor is one attribute but there is another. I mentioned it in post about strong interaction and it is color of quarks. There are three “colors”: RGB — red, green and blue and antired, antigreen and antiblue. Those colors always have to add up to white color. There are lot of combinations which can do this – RGB, antiRantiGantiB, blue and antiblue, red and anti red… and many others

It would be far too easy without gluons which are holding quarks together.
They are usually drawed as a short string between quarks. The thing that they do is color changing. They do it at two points: when they enter and when they leave quark.
There is hypothetical astronomical object called Quark star which should be made up of free quarks. Also it is thought that right after big bang there was state of matter in the Universe called quark-gluon plasma… soup of free quarks and gluons. We are not yet able to create this because it probably needs extremely high temperatures.
On the left is a picture which compares mass of quarks. On the botom you can see grey proton and really small, red electron. Top quark is the largest one.

Particles which are made up of quarks are sorted into different groups: mesons and baryons you can see on the picture what they can look like and how colors add up to white.

Dragallur

1) Particles: Prologue

Hi guys!
I am back with probably short post because I am lazy and tired these days. I know I wanted to start something about triangles but right now I am not that excited for it so I will make some posts about particles. I talked about some before but I have never explained what the hell are quarks for example.

So first of all… particles. Well we think about them like small stuff that is everywhere and everything is made up of it. That is right.
So I will start with molecules, easy peasy those are just two or more atoms made up together.
Atoms are (small), there is some stuff in them but first of all there are “kinds” of atoms, substances and that is Hydrogen, Helium, Oxygen, Carbon. They are made up all from the same things but with different amounts. Atoms are made up of core and shell. Usually, you wont do anything with core. It is very stable and not interacting. In our organism there are only changes in molecules. That means that some atoms will move somewhere else and that will change molecules properties.
Shell is made up of electrons. Electrons are NOT made up of something else, it is just primal stuff. Electron belongs to group of particles that are called elementary particles. It´s sub-group is called fermions and its sub-sub-group is leptons which are really small and light.
Core is made up of neutrons and protons. As I talked about them in four fundamental forces series those are particles (sub-atomic) that are hold together by strong force. Anyway protons are positive and neutrons neutral.
There is huge experiment going on in Japanese which is trying to proof that protons are decaying. Its problem is that one proton has half time about 10^31 years long. They did nice trick so they do not need to wait so long by monitoring ultra clear water. There are thousands tons of water and their machines are able to detect any proton decaying to photons.
Photons are also elemental particles but their sub-group is special for particles that are carriers for fundamental force: photon, gluon, bosons but not graviton because he is only hypothetical. Photons are massless which is why they can travel at the speed of light.
At last for review there are quarks which are elemental particles, even fermions like electrons but they are in special group for quarks.
I actually read something about quarks not being elemental (only hypothetical). It was said that if they are not elemental we can not be sure that there is unlimited number of smaller and smaller particles.

This was just a short preview of what I will write about next time.
Dragallur

5) Four fundamental forces: Strong interaction

Hi there!
I am back again! I was very sick with great temperatures but now I am alright with idea what to write about so I am bringing probably the last post for four fundamental forces today with strong interaction as the strongest of all forces.

Again on the left I have here proton. There are two parts of strong interaction, first is color force which is the stronger one and it holds particles, like hadrons (particles made of quarks) together. You probably heard of colors of quarks, there is green red and blue (RGB) and in such particle like proton or neutron those colors always have to add up to white color. If it would be antiparticle it would have anti red, anti green and anti blue.

Again on left you can see how these colors add up to white. Well what happens is that there is gluon, particle which is carrier for strong interaction and it jumps from quark to quark and when it touches it changes its color. There is great animation in this video, I recommend to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNDOSMqGLlg
This color force is extremely strong so it does not let quarks to go apart. It is even that strong that when you break it new quark will be created from that huge amount of energy! Scientist think that right after big bang when particles were really fast and close to each other there was state of matter called quark-gluon plasma which was kind of soup of quarks and gluons. It is hypothetic and it was not yet created in LHC or somewhere else.

There is that second part of strong interaction called: nuclear force. I am not really sure about it, but anyway you maybe wondered why does nucleas exists when protons(+) should repell each other and that is made by particles called pions which are carrying quarks around and they are creating reaction which is attractive.

On the end, pions are particles made up of two quarks but one of them has to be antiquark so they looks like this:
There are three types of pions and those are Pi+, Pi-, Pi 0. Their life time is incredibly short and they are decaying to neutrinos or gamma rays.

That will be all,
Dragallur
PS: Thanks for your likes and comments