Introduction to particle physics

Absolutely brilliant, thanks so much for sharing.

The plasticene activities are excellent and a great way to get the pupils working things out for themselves. However there are a few errors: (1) dividing matter into hadrons, leptons, and bosons is using the term boson imprecisely - a boson is a particle which obeys Bose-Einstein statistics (spin an integer) as opposed to fermions which obey Fermi-Dirac statistics (half integer spin). It so happens that quarks and leptons are fermions and exchange particles are bosons. Mesons are also bosons. 'Gauge bosons' (plus the Higgs) is the correct term; (2) u, d quarks are in the first generation and s in the second (it is implied all 3 are in the first); (3) a lepton number has to be associated with each lepton generation separately (in other words, there are 3 lepton numbers - Le, Lmu, Ltau) which have to be conserved separately in interactions. This needs to be emphasized (by having separate columns for each one in the lepton table).

Thank you for sharing your resource. This resource has been recommended for teachers by the TES Resource Team and will feature in the Science newsletter.

Outstanding resource many thanks.