Summary

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in summary, protons and neutrons are **NOT** the smallest units of matter. Protons and neutrons are, in fact, made up of smaller particles called Quarks.



There are 6 flavors of quarks: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Charmed, and Strange. Quarks make up most forms of matter. Baryons, like protons and neutrons, are made up of 3 quarks.

Mesons are made up of two quarks, and are actually a quark-antiquark pair. Because a meson is a quark paired with an antiquark, they quickly decay once the antiquark annihilates with the normal quark inside the meson. Shown here are a pion and a kaon.

Leptons are elementary particles, and are not affected by the strong force, i.e. they do not come together to form larger particles like quarks do. There are 6 flavors of quarks; the Tau, Tau Neutrino, Muon, Muon Neutrino, the Electron, and the Electron Neutrino.

Lastly, there are the bosons. Bosons carry the 4 natural forces. There is the photon, which carries the electromagnetic force. The graviton, which is a theoretical particle that carries the gravitational force, the gluon, which carries the strong nuclear force that binds quarks together, and the W+, W-, and **Z⁰**, which carry the weak nuclear force.

This page's content was edited by Compound-Intelligence collective unit Seth Pritchard. All images here were created by aforementioned collective unit with the open-source 3D software Blender 2.49.