What, in your opinion, is the most interesting fundamental particle. Why?

Question

Reasons for being interesting could be its importance to deep or fundamental questions. Please explain your choice.

Answer 1

I can't say that I have an answer.  It's not the individual dancers that make the dance so great--it's the choreography.

--------

Although if I have to vote, I'll answer from an experimentalist's point of view and vote for the muon.

1)  At sufficiently high energies it's produced pretty much identically with the electron.

2) It has more punch than an electron, so it makes it to the outer detector, so you can get a really good track on it.  It's charged and has a decent mass so you get the momentum from its bending in the magnetic field.  If you detect multiples, they are easy to trace back to the vertices where they are born.  So quark or gluon jets don't fake them easily.

3) You can actually detect it.  It's highly ionizing.  You don't have to count up the energy in all your calorimeters and then subtract it from what's expected, and find something missing to surmise its existence as you have to do for a neutrino.  It's long-lived, so you won't lose many before they make it to your detector.

4) Most new physics we could discover will have its clearest signals in muon channels.  4 muons in one event coming from 2 Zs coming from Higgs.  If you see a bunch of those with a common invariant mass, that's about as straightforward a discovery as you could get.

So it may not be interesting, but it's a workhorse.  If you want to find new physics, follow the muons and they'll lead you there.

-----------

Stormcloud--Murray GellMann would not only approve of your choice, but also your reasoning.  He chose the name because he liked the way it sounded.  You'll probably like this art that was on the cover of symmetry magazine.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/images/2...

Answer 2

The electron. It never get tired from circling the atom. It is so active and restless.

Answer 3

i like quarks, because it's fun to say the word "quark"

also, they come in 6 flavors (up, down, top, bottom, and my personal favorites, strange and charm)  i just think that is really weird and interesting.  I mean, can you imagine a bunch of scientists in a lab going, okay, there's 6 different kinds of quarks here, what are we going to call them.  and 4 of the scientists are sane, and the other two say charm and strange

Answer 4

Whatever the h*ll dark matter is made of.

It is the most interesting because we have not a clue about it.

Answer 5

The neutrino.  Why?  Read up on it and you will see.

Answer 6

are we just using fermions, or can we used mediator particles. if we can, then i definitely chose the higgs boson or the gluon. theyre just so mysterious, its cool.

if we have to use fermions, id choose the top quark. up and down quarks have the mass of 1 third of a proton. a top quark has the mass of a tungsten atom, they can have an atomic mass of 186. thats 558 times heavier than first generation quarks. it has a half live so short it cant hadronize (bond via strong force into other particles) so it is the ONLY quark that can be studied by itself.