Particle physics & Antimatter

 ~The standard model

The standard model is by far the most successful theory made by humanity, It explains the easiest looking yet the most fundamental questions; saying that these questions are what lead to the scientific development humans have achieved so far won't be wrong- "what is everything made up of and how does everything work". The standard model of particle physics shows 12 matter particles (Fermions) interacting with 4 forces (Bosons) all held together perhaps by a special force particle Higgs Boson.

-Fermions

Fermions are matter particles that can be subdivided into two categories lepton and quarks. leptons consist of neutrino and electrons well and their higher generation particles second-gen neutrino is known as Muan Neutrino and its third generation is called Tau Neutrino. In a similar fashion, Electrons have second and third-gen particles too known as Muan & Tau respectively; But the second and third-generation particles are unstable and eventually degrade into the first generation. Now, Quarks- They consist of up quark and down quark and well, of course, their higher generation particles second and third-generation particles of up quark are Charm Quark and Top Quark respectively, Second and third-generation particles of down quark are Strange Quark and Bottom Quark. Well if they all are Fermions why would you subdivide them further for no reason? There is a reason behind it; Leptons may or may not be found individually in nature- as, in the case of the neutrino, trillions of them are passing through you every second, and almost each one of them exists as an individual particle, What about the electron? it may exist individually and if you think about it, it actually does it is just bounded with an atom by electromagnetic forces. Quarks are said to have "colour" charges and a caveat of the standard model is that for any particle to exist in nature it must be colourless or white..........well not really but it means that the quarks have so-called colour charges to exist in a group of quarks the on combining form white for example you can have a green a blue and a red they combine to form white this is called a baryon, or you can have a green and the opposite of green, ie- magenta so this forms a meson pair. the colour charges mentioned isn't the real colour of quarks nor does it has anything to do with colours it is just a good analogy to explain things; These groups of quark trio or quark-antiquark pair form a hadron; now you know what the large hadron collider at CERN actually does, Protons and neutrons are also hadrons presumably because they are formed by a quark trio proton contain 2 up and 1 down quark, An up quark has a charge of +2/3 and a down quark has a charge of -1/3, so 2 up and 1 down on coming together give a total charge of +1 which is the charge of a proton. If you're intuitive you must have found out neutrons contain 2 down and 1 up quark making the total charge on the hadron in this case neutron 0 hence making it a neutrally charged particle.

-Bosons

Now, let us talk about the force particles that I mentioned, These interact with fermions to matters of different kinds the 4 particles although only 3 fundamental forces of nature tend to make significant sense in the quantum realm. Gravity is the weakest force of nature and has no effect on subatomic particles yet it has a hypothetical particle associated with it a 'graviton'; the other three stronger forces that have effect in the quantum realm are strong nuclear forces, the electromagnetic forces and weak nuclear forces and these are the ones that are included in the mathematical description of the standard model too

The particle associated with the strong nuclear force is called Gluon it holds the fermions together to form hadrons by forming what is called a flux tube between them, There exists no true vacuum in the universe except for these flux tubes. Now, the electromagnetic forces presumably the particle associated with it is a Photon and its needless to talk about it. The weak forces have two particles called W boson and Z boson and these are responsible for radioactivity- weak nuclear forces tend to have the ability to change an up quark into a down quark and changing a proton into a neutron releasing some amount of energy in the form of a beta (β) particle and this is what is the actual reason behind radioactive beta decay, this is the same force that quickly degrades 2nd and 3rd generation fermions into the first generation fermion making them unstable.

-Higgs bosons

Nothing in this universe actually have any mass it is the Higgs field that gives everything their characteristic mass, I wasn't able to come up with a good analogy to explain this but I still got something- imagine a crazy ball moving across a room with complete vacuum it will go on forever but if you introduce the room with some high-density fluid the ball will get much slower similarly all the particles tend to move at the speed of light and can be imagined as the crazy ball here and the high-density fluid is the Higgs field which slows the particles down which gives it a character which appears to be mass on a macro scale.

As stated earlier as well, The standard model is unquestionably the most successful theory in particle physics which gives answers to every associated question. but the day it fails to give an answer is the day we get to expand our horizon, and there are signs that it might eventually fail to give an answer which may lead us to another theory perhaps are more explicit one.

~Antimatter

Antimatter is nothing but the fermions themselves moving in the negative time axis so an electron gets a positive charge and becomes a positron. But what about the nucleons, they are individual leptons but a mixture of quarks. No rocket science here quarks move backwards in time or towards the negative time axis and once the fermions cross the time axis they are known as antiquark, yes the exact same thing I talked about in the green and magenta quark meson formation. in particle physics, everything related to antimatter has the same magnitude but the opposite sign so the elementary particle chart of the standard model looks more like this

the noteworthy thing here is that all the sign convention happening here is with respect to the fourth dimension so it won't be completely wrong to say that the particle has moved back in time; because we have no other aspect in which we can explain the charges getting reversed when accelerated; we need some entity that is unidirectional in our perspective and time is such an entity. And how do fermions travel back in time? we haven't decoded this bit yet but I am sure eventually we will. When a quark and antiquark collide they release an energy particle- either W or Z boson Or a photon and decays into an electron and an antielectron, so if this is how matter particles were created there must be an equal amount of matter particles and antimatter particles in the universe, but that's not the case antimatter tends to annihilate releasing a relatively huge amount of energy 511eV per matter-antimatter collision; to scale it up 1kg matter colliding with 1kg matter will be equivalent to 3000 nuclear bombs. The unstable character of antiparticles makes it harder to be studied and we are trying our best to make an atmosphere in which they can survive long enough to carry experiments upon, At the CERN Antiproton Decelerator or AD scientists managed to hold 309 antiprotons for 16.67 minutes and given the instability of antiparticles this is a huge achievement. The thought of a particle travelling backwards in time while you observe it in the specious present itself is enthralling and might open us up to more information that we never had a hint about.

~Anas Kazi