Physics and Engineering

A Level Physics splits into 7 main categories which are:

Particle Physics
Quantum Physics
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Classical Mechanics
Atomic and Nuclear Physics
Work, Power and Energy
Electricity and Magnetism

These are the playlists that group all my videos together.

Particle Physics

Particle Physics 1 of 5: Particle Classification

In my first video of my A level particle physics series, we will look at particle classification.

All Particles we know split into 2 main groups, they are fermions and bosons. Fermions have a fractional spin of 1/2 and bosons have a spin of 1, so they don't obey Pauli's exclusion principle, if they had a spin of 1/2 the universe would be a dense molecular soup of confused particles. Fermions spit into Hadrons and leptons; leptons are the lightest fermions and hadrons are the heaviest. Leptons are fundamental, meaning they don't consist of quarks, hadrons on the other hand do. Hadrons split into Baryons and mesons. Mesons are unstable particles and quickly decay, because they are composed of a quark and an anti - quark pair. Baryons split into Nucleons (protons and neutrons) and hyperons.

Particle Physics 2 0f 5: The Standard Model

The table that groups all the fundamental particles in the universe (as far as we know) is called the standard model of particle physics. It is a four by four grid with three families of particles which are Guage Bosons, Leptons and quarks. (If you are not fond of these families, check out the first video.)

The Guage Bosons have a spin of 1 which are the photon, the gluon the W boson, and the Z boson; the Higgs boson has no spin however. These particles are the force carriers between matter. The photon is responsible for carrying the electromagnetic force which acts between charged particles, the gluon is responsible for carrying the strong force or sometimes called the color force that acts between quarks, the W and Z bosons carry the weak force that acts on leptons and quarks, and finally the Higgs boson is responsible for carrying the Higgs field.

The quarks have a spin of 1/2 because they are fermions. These particles make up hadrons, (for instance the proton and the neutron). There're are 6 flavours (quarks) which are the Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top and the Bottom. The Up and the down make up neutrons and protons. A proton has two ups and one down, and neutron has two downs and one up. The Charm quark is the most recently discovered quark.

The Leptons have a spin of 1/2. The leptons and quarks are altogether called fermions, because they are the fundamental particles that make up matter. The Leptons are the electron, muon and tou. And the neutrinos which are the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tou neutrino. The electron and the electron neutrino are the stable versions of leptons, the rest are unstable and decay into the electron or the electron neutrino. This is the same with quarks, the Up and Down are the only stable ones, the same process also applies to these to.