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Particle Fields
What are the characteristic behaviors of quantum particles? Principle ideas
are bulletted; supporting evidence is emphasized subsequently.
- Bosons, in their most fundamental form, manifest as the fields
that mediate the interactions, described later, between fermions. Bosons do not
obey number conservation: they can be created and destroyed in arbitrary
number.
Black-body radiation, laser physics.
- Fermions may be either leptons, with charge 0 or 1,
or quarks, with fractional charge (1/3 and 2/3). Nature does not
appear to like to see fractional charges in the raw, so quarks compose into
baryons (protons and neutrons and their strangely charming,
topsy-turvy relatives). With the exception of the uncharged flavor (the
neutrino), the fermions appear to obey number conservation: interactions must
end with the same "number" of fermions as before the interaction.
Fermions appear to come in generations of two leptons and two quarks. The three
generations become progressively more massive. From relativity, this means that
it takes more energy to generate a charge state as one moves through the
generations. We note that, within a generation, each charge state has a
different mass. In mathematical terms, the mass and charge eigenstates are
identical.
Observation of the dynamics of charge particles moving through magnetic
fields, baryon zoology.
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