![]() These elementary particles are over 200 times more massive than electrons, but have only about one-ninth the the mass of a proton. Credit: Wikipedia Commons/MissMJ/PBS NOVA/Fermilab/Particle Data GroupThe term was chosen to refer to particles of small mass, since the only known leptons in Rosenfeld’s time were muons. The Standard Model of Particle Physics, showing all known elementary particles. In the book, he attributed the use of the word to a suggestion made by Danish chemist and physicist Prof. The first recorded use of the word was by physicist Leon Rosenfeld in his book Nuclear Forces (1948). The word lepton comes from the Greek leptos, which means “small”, “fine”, or “thin”. Where hadrons are composed of other elementary particles (quarks, anti-quarks, etc), leptons are elementary particles that exist on their own. According to this model, all matter in the Universe is composed of two kinds of particles: hadrons – from which Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gets its name – and leptons. Whereas the predominant theory used to be that all matter was made up of indivisible atoms, scientists began to realize that atoms are themselves composed of even smaller particles.įrom these investigations, the Standard Model of Particle Physics was born. In so doing, they quickly realized that the rules which govern them become increasingly blurry the deeper one goes. During the 19th and 20th centuries, physicists began to probe deep into the nature of matter and energy.
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