nLab electron

Contents

matter field fermions (spinors, Dirac fields)

flavors of fundamental fermions in the standard model of particle physics:
generation of fermions	1st generation	2nd generation	3d generation
quarks ( $q$ )
up-type	up quark ( $u$ )	charm quark ( $c$ )	top quark ( $t$ )
down-type	down quark ( $d$ )	strange quark ( $s$ )	bottom quark ( $b$ )
leptons
charged	electron	muon	tauon
neutral	electron neutrino	muon neutrino	tau neutrino

bound states:
mesons	light mesons: pion ( $u d$ ) ρ-meson ( $u d$ ) ω-meson ( $u d$ ) f1-meson a1-meson	strange-mesons: ϕ-meson ( $s \bar s$ ), kaon, K-meson ( $u s$ , $d s$ ) eta-meson ( $u u + d d + s s$ ) charmed heavy mesons*: D-meson ( $u c$ , $d c$ , $s c$ ) J/ψ-meson ( $c \bar c$ )	bottom heavy mesons: B-meson ( $q b$ ) ϒ-meson ( $b \bar b$ )
baryons	nucleons: proton $(u u d)$ neutron $(u d d)$

hadrons (bound states of the above quarks)

bosinos:

dark matter candidates

Exotica

auxiliary fields

Idea

The electron is one of the fundamental particles/matter fields in the standard model of particle physics, one of the leptons.

Mathematically, the electron is a quantum of a Dirac field.

flavors of fundamental fermions in the standard model of particle physics:
generation of fermions	1st generation	2nd generation	3d generation
quarks ( $q$ )
up-type	up quark ( $u$ )	charm quark ( $c$ )	top quark ( $t$ )
down-type	down quark ( $d$ )	strange quark ( $s$ )	bottom quark ( $b$ )
leptons
charged	electron	muon	tauon
neutral	electron neutrino	muon neutrino	tau neutrino

bound states:
mesons	light mesons: pion ( $u d$ ) ρ-meson ( $u d$ ) ω-meson ( $u d$ ) f1-meson a1-meson	strange-mesons: ϕ-meson ( $s \bar s$ ), kaon, K-meson ( $u s$ , $d s$ ) eta-meson ( $u u + d d + s s$ ) charmed heavy mesons*: D-meson ( $u c$ , $d c$ , $s c$ ) J/ψ-meson ( $c \bar c$ )	bottom heavy mesons: B-meson ( $q b$ ) ϒ-meson ( $b \bar b$ )
baryons	nucleons: proton $(u u d)$ neutron $(u d d)$

The concept of intrinsic spin of the electron (making it a “spinor”) originates with:

Samuel A. Goudsmit, George E. Uhlenbeck: Ersetzung der Hypothese vom unmechanischen Zwang durch eine Forderung bezüglich des inneren Verhaltens jedes einzelnen Elektrons, Naturwissenschaften 13 47 (1925) 953 [pdf, pdf]

Historical recollection:

Samuel A. Goudsmit, The discovery of the electron spin, in: Foundations of Modern EPR, World Scientific (1998) [pdf, webpage, doi:10.1142/3624]
Richard G. Milner, A Short History of Spin, Proceedings of PSTP2013, POS 182 (2014) [arXiv:1311.5016, doi:10.22323/1.182.0003]

Last revised on October 22, 2023 at 13:06:15. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.