In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of other particles. The Standard Model presently recognizes seventeen distinct particles—twelve fermions and five bosons. As a consequence of flavor and color combinations and antimatter, the fermions and bosons are known to have 48 and 13 variations, respectively. Among the 61 elementary particles embraced by the Standard Model number electrons and other leptons, quarks, and the fundamental bosons. Subatomic particles such as protons or neutrons, which contain two or more elementary particles, are known as composite particles.
Physics is the natural science of matter, involving the study of matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, with its main goal being to understand how the universe behaves. A scientist who specializes in the field of physics is called a physicist.
Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions and bosons. There are three generations of fermions, although ordinary matter is made only from the first fermion generation. The first generation consists of up and down quarks which form protons and neutrons, and electrons and electron neutrinos. The three fundamental interactions known to be mediated by bosons are electromagnetism, the weak interaction, and the strong interaction.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Geneva, on the France–Switzerland border. It comprises 23 member states. Israel, admitted in 2013, is the only non-European full member. CERN is an official United Nations General Assembly observer.
The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles. It was developed in stages throughout the latter half of the 20th century, through the work of many scientists worldwide, with the current formulation being finalized in the mid-1970s upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks. Since then, proof of the top quark (1995), the tau neutrino (2000), and the Higgs boson (2012) have added further credence to the Standard Model. In addition, the Standard Model has predicted various properties of weak neutral currents and the W and Z bosons with great accuracy.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.
ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of the unprecedented energy available at the LHC and observe phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators. ATLAS was one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012. It was also designed to search for evidence of theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.
The Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) was one of the largest particle accelerators ever constructed. It was built at CERN, a multi-national centre for research in nuclear and particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland.
Physics World is the membership magazine of the Institute of Physics, one of the largest physical societies in the world. It is an international monthly magazine covering all areas of physics, pure and applied, and is aimed at physicists in research, industry, physics outreach, and education worldwide.
Jonathan Richard Ellis is a British theoretical physicist who is currently Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King's College London.
Christine Sutton is a particle physicist who edited the CERN Courier from 2003 to 2015. She retired from CERN in 2015.
The safety of high energy particle collisions was a topic of widespread discussion and topical interest during the time when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and later the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—currently the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator—were being constructed and commissioned. Concerns arose that such high energy experiments—designed to produce novel particles and forms of matter—had the potential to create harmful states of matter or even doomsday scenarios. Claims escalated as commissioning of the LHC drew closer, around 2008–2010. The claimed dangers included the production of stable micro black holes and the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets, and these questions were explored in the media, on the Internet and at times through the courts.
The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge that couples to mass. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately upon generation.
Gian Francesco Giudice is an Italian theoretical physicist working at CERN in particle physics and cosmology.
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee,, is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 45 countries.
The idea that matter consists of smaller particles and that there exists a limited number of sorts of primary, smallest particles in nature has existed in natural philosophy at least since the 6th century BC. Such ideas gained physical credibility beginning in the 19th century, but the concept of "elementary particle" underwent some changes in its meaning: notably, modern physics no longer deems elementary particles indestructible. Even elementary particles can decay or collide destructively; they can cease to exist and create (other) particles in result.
Particle Fever is a 2013 American documentary film tracking the first round of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. The film follows the experimental physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) who run the experiments, as well as the theoretical physicists who attempt to provide a conceptual framework for the LHC's results. The film begins in 2008 with the first firing of the LHC and concludes in 2012 with the successful identification of the Higgs boson.
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is a proposed particle accelerator with an energy significantly above that of previous circular colliders, such as the Super Proton Synchrotron, the Tevatron, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The FCC project is considering three scenarios for collision types: FCC-hh, for hadron-hadron collisions, including proton-proton and heavy ion collisions, FCC-ee, for electron-positron collisions, and FCC-eh, for electron-hadron collisions.
Jeffrey Robert Forshaw is a British particle physicist with a special interest in quantum chromodynamics (QCD): the study of the behaviour of subatomic particles, using data from the HERA particle accelerator, Tevatron particle accelerator and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Since 2004 he has been professor of particle physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.
Kamal Benslama is a Moroccan-Swiss experimental particle physicist. He is a professor of physics at Drew University, a visiting experimental scientist at Fermilab, and a guest scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He worked on the ATLAS experiment, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, which is considered the largest experiment in the history of physical science. At present, he is doing research at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago. Fermilab is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.
