Subatomic particles are divided into two categories: Fermions and Bosons. Fermions are “stuff” particles like electrons and quarks, while Bosons mediate the four fundamental forces. Not all subatomic particles are fundamental, and there are many types, including mesons, hadrons, and glueballs. There are currently 18 known fundamental particles, but thousands of new ones could be created by combining them in different configurations.
There are two main categories of subatomic particles: Fermions and Bosons. Fermions are the particles we think of as “stuff”: leptons like the electron, the neutrino and its cousins, and quarks like the up quark and others in its sizable family. Gauge bosons are the particles that mediate the four fundamental forces of nature: the weak and strong nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity. These include the familiar photon and its much less frequent cousins, the W and Z bosons, gluons, and (physicists expect) the graviton, the much-sought after particle thought to mediate gravitational interactions.
It is important to understand the difference between subatomic particles and fundamental particles. Fundamental means that the particle has no smaller constituents; is critical. Not all subatomic particles are fundamental, although all known fundamental particles are subatomic, that is, smaller than atoms. For example, protons and neutrons, the subatomic particles that make up the atom, are composite rather than fundamental particles, being made up of even smaller quarks and gluons. Exotic particles such as the tau neutrino or muons are subatomic because they are smaller than atoms, but it is important to remember that these are not part of the atoms that make up the visible structures in our universe.
Subatomic particles are so numerous and varied that physicists have used the term “particle zoo” to describe them. In the lepton domain there are 3 types of electrons – electron, muon and tau – 3 types of neutrinos and their antiparticles, which form 12 leptons. There are four known gauge bosons: the photon, the W and Z bosons, and the gluon. Two other bosons, which almost certainly exist, but have not yet been observed, include the Higgs boson and the graviton. This brings the total of fundamental particles to 18. Add the top, down, bottom, up, strange, and charm quarks and their antiquarks, and you get 30 fundamental subatomic particles.
However, that’s not all. You may recall that a proton or a neutron is made up of three quarks. These include two of the up and down quarks and one of the remaining quarks, stuck together with gluons in the nucleus of the atom. However, this is not the only possible quark configuration, only the most stable. If you could somehow collect fundamental particles at will and put them together in arbitrary configurations, you could create thousands of new subatomic particles.
Hundreds of these subatomic particles have actually been observed in particle accelerator experiments. They include mesons, which have only two quarks, and hadrons, which have three as protons and neutrons. There are also the so-called glueballs or gluonium, subatomic particles composed only of gluons, and the suspected tetraquark, a kind of subatomic particle which is supposed to be composed of four quarks. Are there pentaquarks and beyond? Maybe so, but finding them would require an experimental setup far superior to our current best.
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