La física de partículas es una rama de la física que se

encarga del estudiar los componentes elementales de la

materia y las interacciones entre ellos.
Los físicos a lo largo del tiempo han construido un
marco de conceptos para entender la estructura de la
materia, y es conocido como Modelo Estándar, hasta
este momento es el mejor mapa que hay del universo.
Según este modelo, existen partículas elementales que
forman todo lo que nos rodea. Entre los físicos también
se conoce como la teoría de casi todo.
Actualmente se cree que existen 12 partículas
elementales, que en realidad son 17 partículas
fundamentales, pero hacen énfasis a estas 12.
MURRAY GELL-MAN 1969
Las partículas de la primera generación son las que
constituyen todo lo que nos rodea, las de las otras dos
familias se producen en el lab o en la colisión de rayos
cósmicos con átomos de la atmósfera terrestre.
Los átomos están formados por un núcleo y electrones
que se distribuyen a su alrededor. El núcleo a su vez está
formado por protones y neutrones. Los protones y
neutrones están hechos quarks, ya que los electrones se
consideran partículas elementales sin estructura.
HADRONES, QUARKS, FERMIONES Y BOSONES

1era familia forman protones y neutrones

Partículas exóticas
aught the smell of baking and thought that little bits of bread must be floating
through the air and into his nose. He called the little bits “atoms” (meaning
“uncuttable”) and imagined them as tiny spherical balls.

But atoms are not little solid spheres. They are made of even smaller bits, called
particles.

Scientists’ best description of those particles and the forces that govern their
behaviour is called the Standard Model of particle physics, or just “The Standard
Model”.

The Standard Model categorises all of the particles of nature, in the same way that
the periodic table categorises the elements. The theory is called the Standard Model
because it is so successful it has become “standard”.

And no, there is no Economy Model, nor a Deluxe one.

There are, however, still a few kinks to be ironed out (as well as a couple of
whopping omissions). That’s why it is sometimes called the “Theory of Almost
Everything”.

How did it all kick off?

Back in the early 20th century, scientists thought there were only three
fundamental particles in nature: protons and neutrons, which make up the nucleus
of an atom, and electrons that whizz round it.

But in the 1950s and 1960s physicists started smashing these particles together and
some of them broke. It turned out the protons and neutrons had even smaller
particles inside them.

Many dozens of new particles were discovered – and for a while, nobody could
explain them. Physicists called it the “particle zoo”.
In the 1970s, physicists such as Murray Gell-Mann found an order amongst the
chaos. The step they took was similar to the one Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev
took to find an order to the chemical elements in his periodic table.

The new ordering of the particles explained many of the properties of the newly
discovered particles, as well as correctly predicting some new ones.

These 17 fundamental particles make up the Standard Model of particle physics. –

MissMJ/Wikimedia Commons
Meet the family
The particles of the Standard Model make up one big family. Your first introduction
can be daunting, a bit like attending a gathering with a lot of distant cousins you’ve
never heard of. No matter how strange these cousins are, it is important to
remember that they are all related.

The basics
Gell-Mann and others placed the particles in two main categories: fermions and
bosons.

Fermions, such as the electron, make up the stuff we call matter. Bosons, such as
the photon, transmit forces.

Fermions are subdivided again into two kinds of particles, depending on the forces
they feel. These are the quarks and the leptons (see below).

Forces of nature
Particles communicate with one another via four forces: electromagnetism, the
strong force, the weak force and gravity.

The Standard Model describes the first three (gravity does not feature in the
Standard Model, as explained below).

Different particles communicate through different forces, similar to the way people
can communicate in different languages. For example, only the quarks speak
“gluon”. While electrons can speak “photon” as well as “W boson” and “Z boson”.

Electromagnetism is the force that holds electrons in an atom. It is communicated

by photons.

The strong force keeps the nuclei of atoms together. Without it, every atom in the
universe would spontaneously explode. It is communicated by gluons.

The weak force causes radioactive decay. It’s transmitted by W and Z bosons.
The fundamental particles
All matter is made of two types of particles known as quarks and leptons.

Quarks: (the purple particles in the figure) come in six “flavours”, all with weird
names. It’s useful to see them as coming in pairs to make three generations. These
are “up” and “down” (first generation), “charmed” and “strange” (second
generation) and “top” and “bottom” (third generation).

Only the up and down quarks are important in day-to-day life because they make
protons and neutrons.

The others make only “exotic” matter, which is too unstable to form atoms.
Physicists can create exotic matter in particle accelerators, but it usually only lasts a
fraction of a second before decaying.

Leptons: there are six leptons, the best known of which is the electron, a tiny
fundamental particle with a negative charge.

The muon (second generation) and tau (third generation) particles are like fatter
versions of the electron. They also have negative electric charge, but they are too
unstable to feature in ordinary matter.

And each of these particles has a corresponding neutrino, with no charge.

Neutrinos deserve a special mention because they are perhaps the least
understood of all the particles in the Standard Model.

They are fast but interact only through the weak force, which means they can easily
zip straight through a planet. They are created in nuclear reactions, such as those
powering the Sun’s core.

Hadrons: the composite particles

Now that we know the fundamental particles of nature, we can begin to stack them
together in different ways to make bigger particles.

The most important composite particles are the baryons, made of three quarks.
Protons and neutrons are both kinds of baryon.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research's (CERN) biggest particle collider
smashes protons together. Because protons are a kind of hadron, it’s called the
Large Hadron Collider, or LHC.

Antimatter: double or nothing?

As far as we know, all quarks and leptons have twin particles of antimatter.
Antimatter is like matter except it has the opposite charge. For example, the
electron has a counterpart that’s exactly the same mass, except with positive charge
instead of negative. When a particle of matter meets its antimatter twin, they both
annihilate in a burst of pure energy.

Antimatter is incredibly rare in the Universe, although it does have some important
roles in technology. Positron emission tomography (PET) scanners, for instance,
use the annihilation of positrons to see inside the body.

One of the great mysteries of physics is why the Universe is made almost entirely of
matter. Many particle physicists are striving to answer it.

Atoms: composites of composites

The bread that Democritus sniffed is made of only the first generation of
fundamental particles.

Up and down quarks bind together through the strong force to make protons and
neutrons, and the strong force also sticks them together to form the nucleus of an
atom.

Electrons orbit the nucleus in arrangements determined by quantum mechanics

(see our primer quantum physics for the terminally confused).

The Higgs: the god particle

You probably noticed the loner off to the right side of particle table – the Higgs
boson. The Higgs is a special kind of particle that gives the other fundamental
particles their mass.

The idea is that there is a field existing everywhere in space. And when particles
move through space, they tend to bump into this field, and this interaction slows
them down (similar to how it’s more difficult to move through water than air). This
interaction is what gives fundamental particles their mass.

Some particles such as photons and gluons don’t interact with the Higgs field, so
are massless.

Just as photons communicate the electromagnetic force, the Higgs Boson

communicates the Higgs Field.

The Higgs Boson was a theoretical particle until 2013 when CERN announced it
had been discovered at last, although scientists are still uncovering its properties.

What's missing?
Gravity
The biggest hole in the Standard Model is the lack of gravity. The fourth force of
nature just does not fit into the current picture.

Gravity is also incredibly weak compared to the other forces (the strong force is
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times stronger than
gravity, for example).

Some physicists think gravity is also transmitted by a kind of particle, called a

graviton, but so far there is no evidence that this particle exists.

Neutrino mass
The neutrino is so tiny compared to all the other particles that it really begs an
explanation. It’s possible that the neutrino doesn’t get its mass from the Higgs in
the same way other particles do.

Dark Matter: For observing the Universe, it looks like a huge portion of it is made
of Dark Matter – a new kind of stuff that doesn’t interact with regular matter and
so is probably missing from the Standard Model entirely.

Supersymmetry
Some physicists are looking for extensions to the Standard Model to explain these
mysteries. Supersymmetry is one extension where every particle has another twin
with higher mass.

Some of these particles would interact very weakly with ordinary stuff and so could
be good candidates for Dark Matter.

Bosones de geish, pq trasmiten o son portadores de una

interacción fundamental de la naturaleza.
El bosón de Higgs o partícula de Higgs es una partícula elemental propuesta en el modelo
estándar de física de partículas. Recibe su nombre en honor a Peter Higgs quien, junto con
otros, propuso en 1964 el hoy llamado mecanismo de Higgs para explicar el origen de
la masa de las partículas elementales. El bosón de Higgs constituye el cuanto del campo de
Higgs, (la más pequeña excitación posible de este campo). Según el modelo propuesto, no
posee espín, carga eléctrica o color, es muy inestable y se desintegra rápidamente: su vida
media es del orden del zeptosegundo. En algunas variantes del modelo estándar puede haber
varios bosones de Higgs.6
La existencia del bosón de Higgs y del campo de Higgs asociado serían el más simple de
varios métodos del modelo estándar de física de partículas que intentan explicar la razón de la
existencia de masa en las partículas elementales. Esta teoría sugiere que un campo impregna
todo el espacio, y que las partículas elementales que interactúan con él adquieren masa,
mientras que las que no interactúan con él, no la tienen. En particular, dicho mecanismo
justifica la enorme masa de los bosones vectoriales W y Z, como también la ausencia de masa
de los fotones. Tanto las partículas W y Z, como el fotón son bosones sin masa propia, los
primeros muestran una enorme masa porque interactúan fuertemente con el campo de Higgs,
y el fotón no muestra ninguna masa porque no interactúa en absoluto con el campo de Higgs.
El bosón de Higgs ha sido objeto de una larga búsqueda en física de partículas.
El 4 de julio de 2012, el CERN anunció la observación de una nueva partícula «consistente
con el bosón de Higgs», pero se necesitaría más tiempo y datos para confirmarlo.1 El 14 de
marzo de 2013 el CERN, con dos veces más datos de los que disponía en su anuncio del
descubrimiento en julio de 2012, se encontró que la nueva partícula se ve cada vez más como
el bosón de Higgs. La manera en que interactúa con otras partículas y sus propiedades
cuánticas, junto con las interacciones medidas con otras partículas, indican fuertemente que
es un bosón de Higgs. Todavía permanece la cuestión de si es el bosón de Higgs del modelo
estándar o quizás el más liviano de varios bosones predichos en algunas teorías que van más
allá del modelo estándar.7
El 8 de octubre de 2013 se concedió a Peter Higgs, junto a François Englert, el Premio Nobel
de física "por el descubrimiento teórico de un mecanismo que contribuye a nuestro
entendimiento del origen de la masa de las partículas subatómicas, y que, recientemente fue
confirmado gracias al descubrimiento de la predicha partícula fundamental, por los
experimentos ATLAS y CMS en el Colisionador de Hadrones del CERN".