Proton, Neutron, or Electron size.

[Eyal Amir]

One followup question: What is the smallest thing for which we do know
its size? I think that hydrogen atoms are around 5*10^{-11}m.

Thanks,

Eyal

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* Newsgroups: sci.physics.accelerators
* From: elektron <elek...@MailAndNews.com>
* Subject: RE: Proton, Neutron, or Electron size.
* Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 07:02:47 -0500
* Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just one remark.
Actually, all what we know about protons, neutrons and especially
sub-particles is just a collection of phenomenons and nothing more. I mean
that such questions as what size of protons or electrons or what is the
structure of sub-particles is now beyond of our mind. I do not agree that
more powerful accelerators will solve this problem because then we deal with
world of the sub-particles we start to think different . What is an
electron?
Nobody knows. Does a nuclei consist protons, neutrons? Nobody knows. We just
have effects of interactions of the effects.
Kinds.

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[Gordon D. Pusch]

[Thread is off-topic for this NG; set 'Followup-to: sci.physics.particle']

ey...@Steam.Stanford.EDU (Eyal Amir) writes:

> One followup question: What is the smallest thing for which we do know
> its size? I think that hydrogen atoms are around 5*10^{-11}m.

The hadrons (strongly interacting particles like protons, neutrons,
hyperons, etc.) are all about a femotometer (~1e-15m) in diameter,
because that appears to be the characteristic scale of the strong force.
However, the hadrons are believed to all be composite, not elementary
particles, composed of quarks and gluons.

All we can say about the sizes of quarks is that, like electrons and muons,
the current experimental upper bound is that they are much much smaller
than an attometer ( << ~1e-18m), and that all experiments so far are
consistent with them being ``point'' particles.

-- Gordon D. Pusch

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