Subatomic particle
[3] Most force-carrying particles like photons or gluons are called bosons and, although they have quanta of energy, do not have rest mass or discrete diameters (other than pure energy wavelength) and are unlike the former particles that have rest mass and cannot overlap or combine which are called fermions.
Experiments show that light could behave like a stream of particles (called photons) as well as exhibiting wave-like properties.
[4] Another concept, the uncertainty principle, states that some of their properties taken together, such as their simultaneous position and momentum, cannot be measured exactly.
The elementary particles of the Standard Model are:[8] All of these have now been discovered through experiments, with the latest being the top quark (1995), tau neutrino (2000), and Higgs boson (2012).
Most hadrons do not live long enough to bind into nucleus-like composites; those that do (other than the proton and neutron) form exotic nuclei.
In the Standard Model, all the elementary fermions have spin 1/2, and are divided into the quarks which carry color charge and therefore feel the strong interaction, and the leptons which do not.
In special relativity, the energy of a particle at rest equals its mass times the speed of light squared, E = mc2.
Protons are not known to decay, although whether they are "truly" stable is unknown, as some very important Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) actually require it.
For baryons, mesons, and their antiparticles the constituent quarks' charges sum up to an integer multiple of e. Through the work of Albert Einstein, Satyendra Nath Bose, Louis de Broglie, and many others, current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature.
[12] These are the prerequisite basics of Newtonian mechanics, a series of statements and equations in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, originally published in 1687.
Chemistry concerns itself with how electron sharing binds atoms into structures such as crystals and molecules.
The subatomic particles considered important in the understanding of chemistry are the electron, the proton, and the neutron.
The study of subatomic particles, atoms and molecules, and their structure and interactions, requires quantum mechanics.
Analyzing processes that change the numbers and types of particles requires quantum field theory.
