What is the difference between leptons and quarks?

Question

What are hadrons, mesons and baryons?

What is the difference between fermions and bosons?

(Keep it simple, please. Back when I was in school, it was just proton, neutron and electron!)

Answer 1

Quark- quarks make up baryons, which make up protons or neutrons



Leptons- bascially make up electrons



Baryon-a three quark particle which makes up a proton or neutron.



Meson- a subatomic particle which is created by a high energy reaction of matter. It is comprised of one quark and one anti-quark.It will only exist for fractions of a second.



Hadron- is a sub atomic particle made up of quarks so technically a meson and a baryon are both hadrons



Fermions and bosons are harder to explain:



Fermion- is a sub atomic particle made of quarks and leptons which only one of these can occupy the same quantum state.



Boson- Bosons are different in that there is no limit to how many can occupy the same qunatum state



I hope this helps.

Answer 2

Leptons and quarks are all elementary particles.



There are 6 leptons: electron, electron-neutrino, muon, muon-neutrino, tau, tau-neutrino.

There are 6 quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom.



Hadrons are made out of quarks. There are two families of hadrons, mesons and baryons.

Baryons are made out of three quarks. Mesons are made of one quark and one anti-quark.

Examples of Baryons are the proton and the neutron.



Fermions are particles that obey Fermi-Dirac statistics and bosons are particles that obey Bose-Einstein statistics. Mesons are bosons while baryons are fermions. The bosons you've probably heard about recently are the gauge bosons. They are the mediators of fields in quantum field theory. There is the Higg's boson (Higg's field), the W+ W- and Z bosons (weak force), the photon (EM field), the gluon (strong force), and possibly the graviton (gravitational field).



Now, if you take anti-particles into account, you'll end up with 12 leptons and 12 quarks (each one has a corresponding anti-particle).



Furthermore, some propose the existence of a fourth neutrino flavor (or type). They call it sterile neutrino.

Answer 3

We now know there are are six quarks (or called flavours of quarks), which are grouped into 3 pairs (or generations); up & down, charmed & strange and top and bottom. It is these fundamental particles which form neutrons, protons etc, which are collectively known as hadrons, (it is mainly the up and down which form the world around us). The quarks are peculiar as they posses a charge which is a fraction of that for the electron. There are two types of hadron, the Baryon which is a system of three quarks (e.g. the proton) or Mesons, a two quark system containing a quark - antiquark pair (e.g. the pion or pi-meson).



Leptons are particles such as muons and electrons, there are 6 leptons in total, each with their anti-lepton counterpart. For the electron, muon and taon (which are referred to as different flavours of the lepton) there is a corresponding neutrino (a lepton) associated with it.



Difference between the two: Leptons do not participate in the strong interaction and are generally not seen within the nucleus.



Bosons are often force carrier particles (these are typically referred to as gauge bosons). In the prevailing Standard Model of physics, the photon is one of four gauge bosons in the electroweak interaction; the other three are denoted W+, W− and Z0 and are responsible for the weak interaction.

Answer 4

Hadrons are partciles affected by a force known as the Strong Nuclear Force. Mesons and Baryons are both types of Hadrons as they are affected by the Strong Nuclear Force. Baryons are made up of 3 quarks, protons and neutrons are both baryons made up of up and down quarks. (A proton is up, up, down and a neutron is down, down, up). Mesons are made of a quark and an anti-quark and they are broke down into even further groups which I won't go into in order to keep it simple.



Leptons are all particles not affected by the Strong Nuclear Force. An electron is a type of lepton.