These baryons are created through the bonding of quarks according to the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces that act between subatomic particles.

Quarks – a category of elementary particle that composes baryons, or “heavy” subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons.

Muons and tauons are far more massive than electrons. Particle physics defines six flavors, or varieties, of leptons: electrons, muons, tauons, and their neutrino counterparts – the electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tauon neutrinos. They are one of the two basic building blocks of matter. These interact using the weak force, one of four the fundamental forces of the universe.

Leptons – a category of elementary particle that compose the lightest subatomic particles.

Elementary ParticlesĪccording to the Standard Model, there are four groups of elementary particles: There are two categories of subatomic particles – elementary particles and composite particles. The rapid expansion of the study of subatomic space resulted in the creation of a model, The Standard Model of Elementary Particles, in the late 1900s to organize the particles by their behaviors. Each of these divisions are necessary given that the laws of classical physics do not accurately describe the behavior of elementary particles. Subatomic particles are crucial to the study of modern physics, but they are also critical to the field of quantum mechanics, a necessary branch of physics, which, coupled together with particle physics and nuclear physics, helps to illuminate the reasons as to why certain particles behave as they do.

Moreover, the introduction of the photon, originally theorized by Albert Einstein, bolstered the growth of modern physics. The list of subatomic particles has been growing steadily since the discovery of the electron in the late 1800s resulting in the need for new fields of study. A subatomic particle is defined as a particle that is smaller in magnitude than an atom.