Subatomic particle | Definition, Examples, & Classes (2024)

The divisible atom

The physical study of subatomic particles became possible only during the 20th century, with the development of increasingly sophisticated apparatuses to probe matter at scales of 10⁻¹⁵ metre and less (that is, at distances comparable to the diameter of the proton or neutron). Yet the basic philosophy of the subject now known as particle physics dates to at least 500 bce, when the Greek philosopher Leucippus and his pupil Democritus put forward the notion that matter consists of invisibly small, indivisible particles, which they called atoms. For more than 2,000 years the idea of atoms lay largely neglected, while the opposing view that matter consists of four elements—earth, fire, air, and water—held sway. But by the beginning of the 19th century the atomic theory of matter had returned to favour, strengthened in particular by the work of John Dalton, an English chemist whose studies suggested that each chemical element consists of its own unique kind of atom. As such, Dalton’s atoms are still the atoms of modern physics. By the close of the century, however, the first indications began to emerge that atoms are not indivisible, as Leucippus and Democritus had imagined, but that they instead contain smaller particles.

In 1896 the French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity, and in the following year J.J. Thomson, a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge in England, demonstrated the existence of tiny particles much smaller in mass than hydrogen, the lightest atom. Thomson had discovered the first subatomic particle, the electron. Six years later Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy, working at McGill University in Montreal, found that radioactivity occurs when atoms of one type transmute into those of another kind. The idea of atoms as immutable, indivisible objects had become untenable.

The basic structure of the atom became apparent in 1911, when Rutherford showed that most of the mass of an atom lies concentrated at its centre, in a tiny nucleus. Rutherford postulated that the atom resembled a miniature solar system, with light, negatively charged electrons orbiting the dense, positively charged nucleus, just as the planets orbit the Sun. The Danish theorist Niels Bohr refined this model in 1913 by incorporating the new ideas of quantization that had been developed by the German physicist Max Planck at the turn of the century. Planck had theorized that electromagnetic radiation, such as light, occurs in discrete bundles, or “quanta,” of energy now known as photons. Bohr postulated that electrons circled the nucleus in orbits of fixed size and energy and that an electron could jump from one orbit to another only by emitting or absorbing specific quanta of energy. By thus incorporating quantization into his theory of the atom, Bohr introduced one of the basic elements of modern particle physics and prompted wider acceptance of quantization to explain atomic and subatomic phenomena.

Size

Subatomic particles play two vital roles in the structure of matter. They are both the basic building blocks of the universe and the mortar that binds the blocks. Although the particles that fulfill these different roles are of two distinct types, they do share some common characteristics, foremost of which is size.

The small size of subatomic particles is perhaps most convincingly expressed not by stating their absolute units of measure but by comparing them with the complex particles of which they are a part. An atom, for instance, is typically 10⁻¹⁰ metre across, yet almost all of the size of the atom is unoccupied “empty” space available to the point-charge electrons surrounding the nucleus. The distance across an atomic nucleus of average size is roughly 10⁻¹⁴ metre—only 1/10,000 the diameter of the atom. The nucleus, in turn, is made up of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons, collectively referred to as nucleons, and a single nucleon has a diameter of about 10⁻¹⁵ metre—that is, about 1/10 that of the nucleus and 1/100,000 that of the atom. (The distance across the nucleon, 10⁻¹⁵ metre, is known as a fermi, in honour of the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi, who did much experimental and theoretical work on the nature of the nucleus and its contents.)

The sizes of atoms, nuclei, and nucleons are measured by firing a beam of electrons at an appropriate target. The higher the energy of the electrons, the farther they penetrate before being deflected by the electric charges within the atom. For example, a beam with an energy of a few hundred electron volts (eV) scatters from the electrons in a target atom. The way in which the beam is scattered (electron scattering) can then be studied to determine the general distribution of the atomic electrons.

At energies of a few hundred megaelectron volts (MeV; 10⁶ eV), electrons in the beam are little affected by atomic electrons; instead, they penetrate the atom and are scattered by the positive nucleus. Therefore, if such a beam is fired at liquid hydrogen, whose atoms contain only single protons in their nuclei, the pattern of scattered electrons reveals the size of the proton. At energies greater than a gigaelectron volt (GeV; 10⁹ eV), the electrons penetrate within the protons and neutrons, and their scattering patterns reveal an inner structure. Thus, protons and neutrons are no more indivisible than atoms are; indeed, they contain still smaller particles, which are called quarks.

Quarks are as small as or smaller than physicists can measure. In experiments at very high energies, equivalent to probing protons in a target with electrons accelerated to nearly 50,000 GeV, quarks appear to behave as points in space, with no measurable size; they must therefore be smaller than 10⁻¹⁸ metre, or less than 1/1,000 the size of the individual nucleons they form. Similar experiments show that electrons too are smaller than it is possible to measure.