Chapter 46

Particle Physics
and Cosmology
Atoms as Elementary
Particles
 Atoms
 From the Greek for “indivisible”
 Were once thought to be the elementary
particles
 Atom constituents
 Proton, neutron, and electron
 After 1932 these were viewed as
elementary
 All matter was made up of these particles
Discovery of New Particles
 New particles
 Beginning in the 1940s, many new
particles were discovered in experiments
involving high-energy collisions
 Characteristically unstable with short
lifetimes
 Over 300 have been catalogued
 A pattern was needed to understand all
these new particles
Elementary Particles – Quarks
 Physicists recognize that most particles are
made up of quarks
 Exceptions include photons, electrons and a few
others
 The quark model has reduced the array of
particles to a manageable few
 The quark model has successfully predicted
new quark combinations that were
subsequently found in many experiments
Fundamental Forces
 All particles in nature are subject to four
fundamental forces:
 Nuclear force
 Electromagnetic force
 Weak force
 Gravitational force
 This list is in order of decreasing strength
Nuclear Force
 Attractive force between nucleons
 Strongest of all the fundamental forces
 Very short-ranged
 Less than 10-15 m
 Negligible for separations greater than this
Electromagnetic Force
 Is responsible for the binding of atoms
and molecules
 About 10-2 times the strength of the
nuclear force
 A long-range force that decreases in
strength as the inverse square of the
separation between interacting particles
Weak Force
 Is responsible for instability in certain nuclei
 Is responsible for decay processes
 Its strength is about 10-5 times that of the
strong force
 Scientists now believe the weak and
electromagnetic forces are two
manifestations of a single force, the
electroweak force
Gravitational Force
 A familiar force that holds the planets,
stars and galaxies together
 Its effect on elementary particles is
negligible
 A long-range force
 It is about 10-39 times the strength of the
strong force
 Weakest of the four fundamental forces
Explanation of Forces
 Forces between particles are often described
in terms of the actions of field particles or
exchange particles
 Field particles are also called gauge bosons
 The interacting particles continually emit and
absorb field particles
 The emission of a field particle by one particle and
its absorption by another manifests itself as a
force between the two interacting particles
 The force is mediated, or carried, by the field
particles
Forces and Mediating
Particles
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
 1902 – 1984
 Understanding of
antimatter
 Unification of quantum
mechanics and relativity
 Contributions of
quantum physics and
cosmology
 Nobel Prize in 1933
 Antiparticles
 For every particle, there is an antiparticle
 From Dirac’s version of quantum mechanics that incorporated
special relativity
 An antiparticle has the same mass as the particle, but
the opposite charge
 The positron (electron’s antiparticle) was discovered by
Anderson in 1932
 Since then, it has been observed in numerous experiments
 Practically every known elementary particle has a
distinct antiparticle
 Among the exceptions are the photon and the neutral pi
particles
Dirac’s Explanation
 The solutions to the relativistic quantum
mechanic equations required negative energy
states
 Dirac postulated that all negative energy
states were filled
 These electrons are collectively called the Dirac
sea
 Electrons in the Dirac sea are not directly
observable because the exclusion principle
does not let them react to external forces
Dirac’s Explanation, cont.
 An interaction may
cause the electron
to be excited to a
positive energy state
 This would leave
behind a hole in the
Dirac sea
 The hole can react
to external forces
and is observable
Dirac’s Explanation, final
 The hole reacts in a way similar to the
electron, except that it has a positive
charge
 The hole is the antiparticle of the
electron
 The electron’s antiparticle is now called a
positron
Pair Production
 A common source of positrons is pair
production
 A gamma-ray photon with sufficient
energy interacts with a nucleus and an
electron-positron pair is created from
the photon
 The photon must have a minimum
energy equal to 2mec2 to create the pair
 Pair Production, cont.

 A photograph of pair production produced by 300

MeV gamma rays striking a lead sheet
 The minimum energy to create the pair is 1.02 MeV
 The excess energy appears as kinetic energy of the
two particles
Annihilation
 The reverse of pair production can also
occur
 Under the proper conditions, an
electron and a positron can annihilate
each other to produce two gamma ray
photons
e- + e+ → 2γ
Hideki Yukawa
 1907 – 1981
 Nobel Prize in 1949
for predicting the
existence of mesons
 Developed the first
theory to explain the
nature of the nuclear
force
Mesons
 Developed from a theory to explain the
nuclear force
 Yukawa used the idea of forces being
mediated by particles to explain the nuclear
force
 A new particle was introduced whose
exchange between nucleons causes the
nuclear force
 It was called a meson
Mesons, cont.
 The proposed particle would have a mass
about 200 times that of the electron
 Efforts to establish the existence of the
particle were done by studying cosmic rays in
the 1930s
 Actually discovered multiple particles
 pi meson (pion)
 muon
 Not a meson
Pion
 There are three varieties of pions
Muons
 Two muons exist
 µ- and its antiparticle µ+
 The muon is unstable
 It has a mean lifetime of 2.2 µs
 It decays into an electron, a neutrino, and
an antineutrino
Richard Feynman
 1918 – 1988
 Developed quantum
electrodynamics
 Shared the Nobel Prize
in 1965
 Worked on Challenger
investigation and
demonstrated the
effects of cold
temperatures on the
rubber O-rings used
Feynman Diagrams
 A graphical representation of the interaction
between two particles
 Feynman diagrams are named for Richard
Feynman who developed them
 A Feynman diagram is a qualitative graph of
time on the vertical axis and space on the
horizontal axis
 Actual values of time and space are not important
 The actual paths of the particles are not shown
 Feynman Diagram – Two
Electrons
 The photon is the field
particle that mediates the
interaction
 The photon transfers energy
and momentum from one
electron to the other
 The photon is called a virtual
photon
 It can never be detected
directly because it is absorbed
by the second electron very
shortly after being emitted by
the first electron
The Virtual Photon
 The existence of the virtual photon
seems to violate the law of conservation
of energy
 But, due to the uncertainty principle and its
very short lifetime, the photon’s excess
energy is less than the uncertainty in its
energy
 The virtual photon can exist for short time
intervals, such that ∆E ≈ h / 2 ∆t
 Feynman Diagram – Proton and
Neutron (Yukawa’s Model)
 The exchange is via the
nuclear force
 The existence of the pion is
allowed in spite of conservation
of energy if this energy is
surrendered in a short enough
time
 Analysis predicts the rest
energy of the pion to be 130
MeV / c2
 This is in close agreement with
experimental results
Nucleon Interaction – More
About Yukawa’s Model
 The time interval required for the pion to
transfer from one nucleon to the other is

 The distance the pion could travel is c∆t

 Using these pieces of information, the
rest energy of the pion is about 100
MeV
Nucleon Interaction, final
 This concept says that a system of two
nucleons can change into two nucleons plus
a pion as long as it returns to its original state
in a very short time interval
 It is often said that the nucleon undergoes
fluctuations as it emits and absorbs field
particles
 These fluctuations are a consequence of quantum
mechanics and special relativity
Feynman Diagram – Weak
Interaction
 An electron and a
neutrino are
interacting via the
weak force
 The Z0 is the
mediating particle
 The weak force can also
be mediated by the W±
 The W± and Z0 were
discovered in 1983 at
CERN
Classification of Particles
 Two broad categories
 Classified by interactions
 hadrons – interact through strong force
 leptons – interact through weak force
 Note on terminology
 The strong force is reserved for the force between
quarks
 The nuclear force is reserved for the force
between nucleons

The nuclear force is a secondary result of the strong force
Hadrons
 Interact through the strong force
 Two subclasses distinguished by masses and
spins
 Mesons
 Decay finally into electrons, positrons, neutrinos and photons
 Integer spins (0 or 1)
 Baryons
 Masses equal to or greater than a proton
 Half integer spin values (1/2 or 3/2)
 Decay into end products that include a proton (except for the
proton)
 Not elementary, but composed of quarks
Leptons
 Do not interact through strong force
 All have spin of 1/2
 Leptons appear truly elementary
 No substructure
 Point-like particles
 Scientists currently believe only six leptons
exist, along with their antiparticles
 Electron and electron neutrino
 Muon and its neutrino
 Tau and its neutrino
Conservation Laws
 A number of conservation laws are important
in the study of elementary particles
 Already have seen conservation of
 Energy
 Linear momentum
 Angular momentum
 Electric charge
 Two additional laws are
 Conservation of Baryon Number
 Conservation of Lepton Number
Conservation of Baryon
Number
 Whenever a baryon is created in a reaction or
a decay, an antibaryon is also created
 B is the baryon number
 B = +1 for baryons
 B = -1 for antibaryons
 B = 0 for all other particles
 The sum of the baryon numbers before a
reaction or a decay must equal the sum of
baryon numbers after the process
Conservation of Baryon
Number and Proton Stability
 There is a debate over whether the proton
decays or not
 If baryon number is absolutely conserved, the
proton cannot decay
 Some recent theories predict the proton is
unstable and so baryon number would not be
absolutely conserved
 For now, we can say that the proton has a half-life
of at least 1033 years
Conservation of Baryon
Number, Example
 Is baryon number conserved in the
following reaction?


 Baryon numbers:
 Before: 1 + 1 = 2
 After: 1 + 1 + 1 + (-1) = 2
 Baryon number is conserved
 The reaction can occur as long as energy
is conserved
 Conservation of Lepton
Number
 There are three conservation laws, one for
each variety of lepton
 The law of conservation of electron
lepton number states that the sum of
electron lepton numbers before the
process must equal the sum of the
electron lepton number after the process
 The process can be a reaction or a decay
Conservation of Lepton
Number, cont.
 Assigning electron lepton numbers
 Le = 1 for the electron and the electron neutrino
 Le = -1 for the positron and the electron
antineutrino
 Le = 0 for all other particles
 Similarly, when a process involves muons,
muon lepton number must be conserved and
when a process involves tau particles, tau
lepton numbers must be conserved
 Muon and tau lepton numbers are assigned
similarly to electron lepton numbers
Conservation of Lepton
Number, Example
 Is lepton number conserved in the
following reaction?


 Check electron lepton numbers:

 Before: Le = 0 After: Le = 1 + (-1) + 0 = 0
 Electron lepton number is conserved
 Check muon lepton numbers:
 Before: Lµ = 1 After: Lµ = 0 + 0 + 1 = 1
 Muon lepton number is conserved
Strange Particles
 Some particles discovered in the 1950s were
found to exhibit unusual properties in their
production and decay and were given the
name strange particles
 Peculiar features include:
 Always produced in pairs
 Although produced by the strong interaction, they
do not decay into particles that interact via the
strong interaction, but instead into particles that
interact via weak interactions

They decay much more slowly than particles decaying via
strong interactions
 Strangeness
 To explain these unusual properties, a new
quantum number S, called strangeness, was
introduced
 A new law, the law of conservation of
strangeness was also needed
 It states that the sum of strangeness numbers before
a reaction or a decay must equal the sum of the
strangeness numbers after the process
 Strong and electromagnetic interactions obey
the law of conservation of strangeness, but the
weak interaction does not
Bubble Chamber
Example of Strange Particles
 The dashed lines
represent neutral
particles
 At the bottom,
π - + p → K0 + Λ0
Then Λ0 → π - + p
and
K0 → π + µ- + νµ
Creating Particles
 Most elementary particles are unstable
and are created in nature only rarely, in
cosmic ray showers
 In the laboratory, great numbers of
particles can be created in controlled
collisions between high-energy particles
and a suitable target
Measuring Properties of
Particles
 A magnetic field causes the charged particles
to curve
 This allows measurement of their charge and
linear momentum
 If the mass and momentum of the incident
particle are known, the product particle’s
mass, kinetic energy, and speed can usually
be calculated
 The particle’s lifetime can be calculated from
the length of its track and its speed
Resonance Particles
 Short-lived particles are known as
resonance particles
 They exist for times around 10-20 s
 They cannot be detected directly
 Their properties can be inferred from
data on their decay products
Experimental Evidence
 The location of the
peak tells us the mass
of the particle
 The smaller peaks
indicate the presence
of two other resonance
particles
 The width of the peak
can be used to infer
the lifetime of the
particle
Murray Gell-Mann
 1929 –
 Studies dealing with
subatomic particles
 Named quarks
 Developed pattern
known as eightfold
way
 Nobel Prize in 1969
The Eightfold Way
 Many classification schemes have been
proposed to group particles into families
 These schemes are based on spin, baryon
number, strangeness, etc.
 The eightfold way is a symmetric pattern
proposed by Gell-Mann and Ne’eman
 There are many symmetrical patterns that can be
developed
 The patterns of the eightfold way have much
in common with the periodic table
 Including predicting missing particles
An Eightfold Way for Baryons
 A hexagonal pattern for
the eight spin 1/2
baryons
 Stangeness vs. charge
is plotted on a sloping
coordinate system
 Six of the baryons form
a hexagon with the
other two particles at its
center
An Eightfold Way for Mesons
 The mesons with spins of
0 can be plotted
 Strangeness vs. charge
on a sloping coordinate
system is plotted
 A hexagonal pattern
emerges
 The particles and their
antiparticles are on
opposite sides on the
perimeter of the hexagon
 The remaining three
mesons are at the center
Eightfold Way for Spin 3/2
Baryons
 The nine particles
known at the time were
arranged as shown
 An empty spot occurred
 Gell-Mann predicted the
missing particle and its
properties
 About three years later,
the particle was found
and all its predicted
properties were
confirmed
Quarks
 Hadrons are complex particles with size
and structure
 Hadrons decay into other hadrons
 There are many different hadrons
 Quarks are proposed as the elementary
particles that constitute the hadrons
 Originally proposed independently by Gell-
Mann and Zweig
Original Quark Model
 Three types or flavors
 u – up
 d – down
 s – strange
 Associated with each quark is an antiquark
 The antiquark has opposite charge, baryon number
and strangeness
 Quarks have fractional electrical charges
 +1/3 e and –2/3 e
 All ordinary matter consists of just u and d
quarks
Original Quark Model – Rules
 All the hadrons at the time of the
original proposal were explained by
three rules
 Mesons consist of one quark and one
antiquark
 This gives them a baryon number of 0
 Baryons consist of three quarks
 Antibaryons consist of three antiquarks
 Quark Composition of
Particles – Examples
 Mesons are
quark-
antiquark pairs
 Baryons are
quark triplets
Active Figure 46.12

(SLIDESHOW MODE ONLY)

Additions to the Original
Quark Model – Charm
 Another quark was needed to account for
some discrepancies between predictions of
the model and experimental results
 A new quantum number, C, was assigned to
the property of charm
 Charm would be conserved in strong and
electromagnetic interactions, but not in weak
interactions
 In 1974, a new meson, the J/Ψ, was
discovered that was shown to be a charm
quark and charm antiquark pair
More Additions –
Top and Bottom
 Discovery led to the need for a more
elaborate quark model
 This need led to the proposal of two new
quarks
 t – top (or truth)
 b – bottom (or beauty)
 Added quantum numbers of topness and
bottomness
 Verification
 b quark was found in a Y- meson in 1977
 t quark was found in 1995 at Fermilab
Numbers of Particles
 At the present, physicists believe the
“building blocks” of matter are complete
 Six quarks with their antiparticles
 Six leptons with their antiparticles
Particle Properties
More About Quarks
 No isolated quark has ever been observed
 It is believed that at ordinary temperatures,
quarks are permanently confined inside
ordinary particles due to the strong force
 Current efforts are underway to form a quark-
gluon plasma where quarks would be freed
from neutrons and protons
 Color
 It was noted that certain particles had
quark compositions that violated the
exclusion principle
 Quarks are fermions, with half-integer
spins and so should obey the exclusion
principle
 The explanation is an additional
property called color charge
 The color has nothing to do with the visual
sensation from light, it is simply a name
 Colored Quarks
 Color “charge” occurs in red, blue, or green
 Antiquarks have colors of antired, antiblue, or
antigreen
 These are the quantum “numbers” of color charge
 Color obeys the exclusion principle
 A combination of quarks of each color
produces white (or colorless)
 Baryons and mesons are always colorless
Quantum Chromodynamics
(QCD)
 QCD gave a new theory of how quarks
interact with each other by means of color
charge
 The strong force between quarks is often
called the color force
 The strong force between quarks is mediated
by gluons
 Gluons are massless particles
 When a quark emits or absorbs a gluon, its
color may change
More About Color Charge
 Particles with like colors repel and those with
opposite colors attract
 Different colors attract, but not as strongly as a
color and its anticolor
 The color force between color-neutral
hadrons is negligible at large separations
 The strong color force between the constituent
quarks does not exactly cancel at small
separations
 This residual strong force is the nuclear force that
binds the protons and neutrons to form nuclei
Quark Structure of a Meson
 A green quark is
attracted to an
antigreen quark
 The quark –
antiquark pair forms
a meson
 The resulting meson
is colorless
Quark Structure of a Baryon
 Quarks of different
colors attract each
other
 The quark triplet
forms a baryon
 Each baryon contains
three quarks with
three different colors
 The baryon is
colorless
QCD Explanation of a
Neutron-Proton Interaction
 Each quark within the
proton and neutron is
continually emitting and
absorbing gluons
 The energy of the gluon
can result in the
creation of quark-
antiquark pairs
 When close enough,
these gluons and
quarks can be
exchanged, producing
the strong force
Elementary Particles –
A Current View
 Scientists now believe there are three
classifications of truly elementary particles
 Leptons
 Quarks
 Field particles
 These three particles are further classified as
fermions or bosons
 Quarks and leptons are fermions
 Field particles are bosons
Weak Force
 The weak force is believed to be mediated by
the W+, W-, and Z0 bosons
 These particles are said to have weak charge
 Therefore, each elementary particle can have
 Mass
 Electric charge
 Color charge
 Weak charge
Electroweak Theory
 The electroweak theory unifies
electromagnetic and weak interactions
 The theory postulates that the weak and
electromagnetic interactions have the
same strength when the particles
involved have very high energies
 Viewed as two different manifestations of a
single unifying electroweak interaction
The Standard Model
 A combination of the electroweak theory and
QCD for the strong interaction form the
Standard Model
 Essential ingredients of the Standard Model
 The strong force, mediated by gluons, holds the quarks
together to form composite particles
 Leptons participate only in electromagnetic and weak
interactions
 The electromagnetic force is mediated by photons
 The weak force is mediated by W and Z bosons
 The Standard Model does not actually yet
include the gravitational force
The Standard Model – Chart
 Mediator Masses
 Why does the photon have no mass while
the W and Z bosons do have mass?
 Not answered by the Standard Model
 The difference in behavior between low and
high energies is called symmetry breaking
 The Higgs boson has been proposed to
account for the masses
 Large colliders are necessary to achieve the energy
needed to find the Higgs boson
 In a collider, particles with equal masses and equal
kinetic energies, traveling in opposite directions,
collide head-on to produce the required reaction
Particle Paths After a Collision
Particle Paths After a Collision
with a Gold Nucleus
The Big Bang
 This theory states that the universe had a
beginning, and that it was so cataclysmic that
it is impossible to look back beyond it
 Also, during the first few minutes after the
creation of the universe, all four interactions
were unified
 All matter was contained in a quark-gluon plasma
 As time increased and temperature
decreased, the forces broke apart
A Brief History of the Universe
Cosmic Background Radiation
(CBR)
 CBR represents the
cosmic “glow” left over
from the Big Bang
 The radiation had equal
strengths in all directions
 The curve fits a black
body at 2.7K
 There are small
irregularities that allowed
for the formation of
galaxies and other objects
CBR, cont.
 The COBE satellite found that the
background radiation had irregularities
that corresponded to temperature
variations of 0.000 3 K
 Including other data, it was concluded
that a peak in fluctuation intensity
occurred 300 000 years after the Big
Bang
Hubble’s Law
 The Big Bang theory predicts that the
universe is expanding
 Hubble claimed the whole universe is
expanding
 Furthermore, the speeds at which galaxies
are receding from the earth is directly
proportional to their distance from us
 This is called Hubble’s law
 Hubble’s Law, cont.
 Hubble’s law can
be written as
v = HR
 H is called the
Hubble constant
 H ≈ 17 x 10-3 m/s ly
Remaining Questions About
the Universe
 Will the universe expand forever?
 Today, astronomers and physicists are trying to
determine the rate of expansion
 It depends on the average mass density of the
universe compared to a critical density
 Missing mass in the universe
 The amount of non-luminous (dark) matter seems
to be much greater than what we can see
 Various particles have been proposed to make up
this dark matter
Another Remaining Question
About the Universe
 Is there mysterious energy in the
universe?
 Observations have led to the idea that the
expansion of the universe is accelerating
 To explain this acceleration, dark energy
has been proposed
 The dark energy results in an effective
repulsive force that causes the expansion
rate to increase
Some Questions in Particle
Physics
 Why so little antimatter in the Universe?
 Is it possible to unify electroweak and strong forces?
 Why do quarks and leptons form similar but distinct
families?
 Are muons the same as electrons apart from their
difference in mass?
 Why are some particles charged and others not?
 Why do quarks carry fractional charge?
 What determines the masses of fundamental
particles?
 Can isolated quarks exist?
A New Perspective –
String Theory
 String theory is one current effort at
answering some of the previous
questions
 It is an effort to unify the four
fundamental forces by modeling all
particles as various vibrational modes of
an incredibly small string
String Theory, cont.
 The typical length of a string is 10-35 m
 This is called the Planck length
 According to the string theory, each
quantized mode of vibration of the
string corresponds to a different
elementary particle in the Standard
Model
Complications of the String
Theory
 It requires space-time to have ten
dimensions
 Four of the ten dimensions are visible to
us, the other six are compactified (curled)
 Another complication is that it is difficult
for theorists to guide experimentalists
as to what to look for in an experiment
 Direct experimentation on strings is
impossible
String Theory Prediction –
SUSY
 One prediction of string theory is
supersymmetry (SUSY)
 It suggests that every elementary particle
has a superpartner that has not yet been
observed
 Supersymmetry is a broken symmetry and
the masses of the superpartners are above
our current capabilities to detect
Another Perspective –
M-Theory
 M-theory is an eleven-dimensional
theory based on membranes rather
than strings
 M-theory is claimed to reduce to string
theory if one compactifies from the
eleven dimensions to ten