Science

Science of Matter, Energy, Space and Time

What is the world made of?

The building blocks

Physicists have identified 13 building blocks that are the fundamental constituents of matter. Our everyday world is made of just three of these building blocks: the up quark, the down quark and the electron. This set of particles is all that's needed to make protons and neutrons and to form atoms and molecules. The electron neutrino, observed in the decay of other particles, completes the first set of four building blocks.

For some reason nature has elected to replicate this first generation of quarks and leptons to produce a total of six quarks and six leptons, with increasing mass. Like all quarks, the sixth quark, named top, is much smaller than a proton (in fact, no one knows how small quarks are), but the top is as heavy as a gold atom!

Although there are reasons to believe that there are no more sets of quarks and leptons, theorists speculate that there may be other types of building blocks, which may partly account for the dark matter implied by astrophysical observations. This poorly understood matter exerts gravitational forces and manipulates galaxies. It will take Earth-based accelerator experiments to identify its fabric.

The forces

Scientists distinguish four elementary types of forces acting among particles: strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational force.

• The strong force is responsible for quarks "sticking" together to form protons, neutrons and related particles.
• The electromagnetic force binds electrons to atomic nuclei (clusters of protons and neutrons) to form atoms.
• The weak force facilitates the decay of heavy particles into smaller siblings.
• The gravitational force acts between massive objects. Although it plays no role at the microscopic level, it is the dominant force in our everyday life and throughout the universe.

Particles transmit forces among each other by exchanging force-carrying particles called bosons. These force mediators carry discrete amounts of energy, called quanta, from one particle to another. You could think of the energy transfer due to boson exchange as something like the passing of a basketball between two players.

Each force has its own characteristic bosons:

• The gluon mediates the strong force; it "glues" quarks together.
• The photon carries the electromagnetic force; it also transmits light.
• The W and Z bosons represent the weak force; they introduce different types of decays.

Physicists expect that the gravitational force may also be associated with a boson particle. Named the graviton, this hypothetical boson is extremely hard to observe since, at the subatomic level, the gravitational force is many orders of magnitude weaker than the other three elementary forces.

Table of particle discoveries: who, when, where?

The Higgs boson

The Higgs boson is a particle associated with the Higgs field, the mechanism through which elementary particles gain mass. Without the Higgs field, or something similar, atoms would not form, and there would be no chemistry, no biology and no life.

The Higgs field is like a giant vat of molasses spread throughout the universe. Most of the known types of particles that travel through it stick to the molasses, which slows them down and makes them heavier. The Higgs boson is a particle that helps transmit the mass-giving Higgs force field, similar to the way a particle of light, the photon, transmits the electromagnetic field.

The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, announced the discovery of the Higgs particle in July 2012.

Antimatter

Although it is a staple of science fiction, antimatter is as real as matter. For every particle, physicists have discovered a corresponding antiparticle, which looks and behaves in almost the same way. Antiparticles, though, have the opposite properties of their corresponding particles. An antiproton, for example, has a negative electric charge while a proton is positively charged.

In the mid-1990s, physicists at CERN (1995) and Fermilab (1996) created the first anti-atoms. To learn more about the properties of the antimatter world, they carefully added a positron (the antiparticle of an electron) to an antiproton. The result: antihydrogen.

Storing antimatter is a difficult task. As soon as an antiparticle and a particle meet, they annihilate, disappearing in a flash of energy. Using electromagnetic force fields, physicists are able to store antimatter inside vacuum vessels for a limited amount of time.

WIMPS and dark matter

No one has ever directly observed dark matter, but two clues led astronomers to suspect its existence. First, when researchers measured the masses of all the stars and planets that make up galaxies, they discovered that the gravity of those objects alone would not be great enough to hold them together. Something they could not see must have been contributing mass and therefore gravitational pull. Second, they observed in space the kind of distortions of light usually caused by large masses in areas that seemed empty.

The composition of dark matter is unknown, and its existence shows that the Standard Model of particle physics is incomplete. Several theories of particle physics, such as supersymmetry, predict that weakly interacting massive particles, WIMPs, exist with properties suitable for explaining dark matter.

Dark energy

In the 20th century, astronomers first discovered that the universe was getting bigger. They found this by observing something similar to the Doppler effect in the light coming from distant galaxies. The Doppler effect is what causes a car horn to change in pitch from high to low as it approaches and passes. This happens because the sound waves are compressed as the car moves toward you, resulting in a higher pitch, and are stretched as it recedes, resulting in a lower pitch. As an object approaches you, the light waves coming from it compress. Astronomers call this blueshift. When light waves stretch as an object moves farther away, astronomers call it redshift.

By measuring the spectrum of an astronomical object, astronomers can tell how much the space between the object and observer has stretched as the light traveled through it. When astronomer Vesto Slipher measured light coming from other galaxies, he found that almost all were redshifted, or moving away. He found that those that seemed dimmer and farther away had even higher redshifts. The universe was expanding. This led astronomers to the idea of the big bang.

Astronomers assumed, however, that the force of gravity from all of the matter in the universe would slow the expansion. They were in for a surprise in 1998 when they discovered that the expansion was actually speeding up. Astronomers discovered this when they measured the brightness of the light coming from a certain type of supernova that always explodes with roughly the same energy. The dimmer the light from the supernova, the farther the distance it had traveled to Earth. They discovered that the supernovae were farther away than their redshift measurements predicted. The universe was expanding at an accelerating rate.

Some particle astrophysicists think this is happening because a force with a repulsive gravity is pushing the universe apart. They call this force dark energy.

The Standard Model

Physicists call the theoretical framework that describes the interactions between elementary building blocks (quarks and leptons) and the force carriers (bosons) the Standard Model. Gravity is not yet part of this framework, and a central question of 21st-century particle physics is the search for a quantum formulation of gravity that could be included in the Standard Model.

Though still called a model, the Standard Model is a fundamental and well-tested physics theory. Physicists use it to explain and calculate a vast variety of particle interactions and quantum phenomena. High-precision experiments have repeatedly verified subtle effects predicted by the Standard Model.

So far, the biggest success of the Standard Model is the unification of the electromagnetic and the weak forces into the so-called electroweak force. The consolidation is a milestone comparable to the unification of the electric and the magnetic forces into a single electromagnetic theory by J.C. Maxwell in the 19th century. Physicists think it is possible to describe all forces with a Grand Unified Theory.