Tuesday 11 February 2020

Why do physicists think that the electron is an elementary particle?


When we first discovered the proton and neutron, I'm sure scientists didn't think that it was made up of quark arrangements, but then we figured they could be and experiments proved that they were.


So, what is it about the electron that leads us to believe that it isn't a composite particle? What evidence do we have to suggest that it it isn't?



Answer



Believe you me, people have devoted a lot of time to coming up with composite models of the electron, without much to show for it. For example, see the preon.


High energy scattering experiments have shown that the charge radius of the electron is very small, and yet the rest mass of the electron is also very small. It's difficult (though not impossible) to achieve both in a composite model.


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