High Energy Particle Physics

The Short-Range or "Particle" Forces

Authors: John A. Gowan
Comments: 16 pages. This paper has also been published as a Google "Knol".

The strong force is responsible for the binding of compound atomic nuclei and the binding of quarks in the class of heavy composite particles, the hadrons. Hadrons consist of baryons (containing 3 quarks) and mesons (containing quark-antiquark pairs). The weak force is responsible for the creation, destruction, and transformation of single, unpaired elementary particles (quarks and leptons). Both forces are to be understood in terms of energy, charge, and especially symmetry conservation. The strong force conserves whole quantum units of charge and achieves "least bound energy" nuclear configurations; the weak force ensures the invariance of all conserved parameters in elementary particles during the creation, destruction, or transformation of single, unpaired particles.
Category: High Energy Particle Physics