ABSTRACT
With the discovery of the electron in 1897 by J J Thomson a new era of physicstoday called elementary particle physics-started. By destroying the atom as the fundamental building block of matter the question arose as to what other particles could be inside the atom. Probing smaller and smaller length scales equivalent to going to higher and higher energies by using high-energy accelerators a complete ‘zoo’ of new particles was discovered, which finally led to the currently accepted standard model (SM) of particle physics (see chapter 3). Here, the building blocks of matter consist of six quarks and six leptons shown in table 1.1, all of them being spin-12 fermions. They interact with each other through four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism and the strong and weak interactions.
