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Questions tagged [standard-model]

A model of the basic particles and forces featuring six quarks, three charged leptons, three massless neutral leptons and four fundamental force carrying bosons. The twelve fermions are arranged into three generations, while the bosons serve to explain the electromagnetic interaction plus the strong and weak nuclear forces (and the Higgs mechanism). Do NOT use this tag for the standard model of cosmology, etc..

70 votes
5 answers
36k views

Why do electron and proton have the same but opposite electric charge?

What is the explanation between equality of proton and electron charges (up to a sign)? This is connected to the gauge invariance and renormalization of charge is connected to the renormalization of ...
Newman's user avatar
  • 2,586
119 votes
7 answers
45k views

What's inside a proton?

What constitutes protons? When I see pictures, I can't understand. Protons are made of quarks, but some say that they are made of 99% empty space. Also, in this illustration from Wikipedia, what's ...
MyFavouritePhysicistIsNewtax's user avatar
16 votes
2 answers
5k views

About free quarks and confinement

I simply know that a single free quark does not exist. What is the reason that we can not get a free quark? If we can't get a free quark then what is single-top-quark?
Curious's user avatar
  • 1,063
33 votes
6 answers
4k views

Where is the evidence that the electron is pointlike?

I'm writing a piece about the electron, and I'm having trouble finding evidence to back up the claim that the evidence is pointlike. People tend to say the observation of a single electron in a ...
John Duffield's user avatar
52 votes
3 answers
15k views

Are W & Z bosons virtual or not?

W and Z bosons are observed/discovered. But as force carrying bosons they should be virtual particles, unobservable? And also they require to have mass, but if they are virtual they may be off-shell, ...
user1702's user avatar
  • 553
36 votes
4 answers
4k views

Why do we need complex representations in Grand Unified Theories?

EDIT4: I think I was now able to track down where this dogma originally came from. Howard Georgi wrote in TOWARDS A GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF FLAVOR There is a deeper reason to require ...
jak's user avatar
  • 10.1k
34 votes
6 answers
28k views

Books for particle physics and the Standard Model

I know classical physics, quantum mechanics, special relativity, and basic nuclear physics. I would like to get into some particle physics. Where can I find a good introduction? It might be useful ...
27 votes
4 answers
25k views

Is the Higgs boson not responsible for most mass?

The video "Your Mass is NOT from Higgs Boson?" argues that almost all the mass that we are made of doesn't come interaction with the Higgs field, but rather that most of a nucleus's mass comes from ...
alex's user avatar
  • 363
23 votes
1 answer
9k views

Origin of electric charge

Baryons have charges that are the result of a polynomial calculation of their building blocks (quarks)'s fractional charges. But what gives these quarks electric charges? What interactions do they ...
Ze Photon's user avatar
  • 361
19 votes
2 answers
3k views

Quarks in a hadron: where does the mass come from?

We know that the sum of the masses of the quarks in a proton is approximately $9.4^{+1.9}_{-1.3}~\text{MeV}/c^2$, whereas the mass of a proton is $\approx931~\text{MeV}/c^2$. This extra mass is ...
Tamoghna Chowdhury's user avatar
30 votes
2 answers
4k views

What happens to matter in a standard model with zero Higgs VEV?

Suppose you reset the parameters of the standard model so that the Higgs field average value is zero in the vacuum, what would happen to standard matter? If the fundamental fermions go from a finite ...
Mark Adler's user avatar
45 votes
2 answers
2k views

Identification of particles and anti-particles

The identification of an electron as a particle and the positron as an antiparticle is a matter of convention. We see lots of electrons around us so they become the normal particle and the rare and ...
John Rennie's user avatar
28 votes
5 answers
23k views

Why don’t photons interact with the Higgs field?

Why don’t photons interact with the Higgs field and hence remain massless?
Aritra De's user avatar
  • 369
19 votes
3 answers
5k views

Do strong and weak interactions have classical force fields as their limits?

Electromagnetic interaction has classical electromagnetism as its classical limit. Is it possible to similarly describe strong and weak interactions classically?
Aleksei Averchenko's user avatar
81 votes
6 answers
14k views

Why do we think there are only three generations of fundamental particles?

In the standard model of particle physics, there are three generations of quarks (up/down, strange/charm, and top/bottom), along with three generations of leptons (electron, muon, and tau). All of ...
Scott Carnahan's user avatar

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