Big Questions: The Ultimate Building Blocks of Matter

The Standard Model of particle physics treats quarks and leptons as having no size at all. Quarks are found inside protons and neutrons and the most familiar lepton is the electron. While the best measurements to date support that idea, there is circumstantial evidence that suggests that perhaps the these tiny particles might be composed of even smaller building blocks. This video explains this circumstantial evidence and introduces some very basic ideas of what those building blocks might be.

 

Quarks and gluons with an unsung hero: Professor Graham Ross

Professor Graham Ross from the University of Oxford, winner of the 2012 Dirac Medal awarded by the Institute of Physics for his work in developing the standard model of particles and forces that has led to many new insights into the origins and nature of the universe. A powerhouse of physics, and one of the UK's best kept secrets, Graham laid out the pathway to the discovery of the gluon, the force carrier for the strong nuclear force, and taught Richard Feynman how quantum chromodynamics could be used to work out the interactions between quarks and gluons.

 

The Standard Model

Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln describes the Standard Model of particle physics, covering both the particles that make up the subatomic realm and the forces that govern them.

 

Weak Interaction: The Four Fundamental Forces of Physics #2

Hank continues our series on the four fundamental forces of physics by describing the weak interaction, which operates at an infinitesimally small scale to cause particle decay.

Other Sci-Show videos

Strong Interaction: The Four Fundamental Forces of Physics

Part one of a four part series on the fundamental forces (or interactions) of physics begins with the strong force or strong interaction - which on the small scale holds quarks together to form protons, neutrons and other hadron particles.

 

 Hank continues his primer on the strongest of the four fundamental interactions of physics, the strong interaction. Today he talks about the nuclear force and a force carrier called a pion.

 

Other Sci-Show videos

Hidden Worlds - Hunting for Quarks in Ordinary Matter

Dr. Timothy Paul Smith - Dartmouth College
February 26, 2003

How can scientists know anything about quarks, particles which are 100,000 times smaller than atoms? How do quarks arrange themselves to make ordinary matter? Learn about the hidden world of quarks, the particles which are inside of everything, everywhere!

Other lectures from Jefferson Lab Science Series

Quarks (Sixty Symbols)

Professor Roger Bowley and Professor Ed Copeland from the University of Nottingham talk about quarks.

Source:  Sixty Symbols

Jefferson Lab and the Mystery of Quarks

Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility