Fundamental Particles

Fundamental particles or elementary particles are subatomic particles which cannot be further divided.

The standard model has 17 distinct fundamental particles - 12 fermions and 5 bosons.
As a result of flavour and colour charges and anti-particles, fermions and bosons are known to have 48 and 13 variations respectively, constituting 61 fundamental particles.

Fermions

They are subatomics particles with fractional spin quantum numbers. They obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. They are:

• Quarks and Antiquarks
• Leptons and Antileptons

Bosons

They are subatomics particles with integer spin quantum numbers. They obey Bose-Einstein statistics. They are:

• Gauge Bosons: Photons, W and Z Bosons, Eight types of Gluons, Gravitons (hypothetical)
• Scalar Bosons: Higgs Boson

Hadrons

They are Composite Particles made by two or more quarks held together by Strong Interactions. Each hadron must fall under the category of either a boson or a fermion. They are of two types:

• Baryons
• Mesons

Quasiparticles

Fermion-like

• Three degrees of freedom of an electron within a molecule (charge, spin, orbital) can be seperated by the wavefunction into three particles: Holon, Spinon, Orbiton
• An electron that doesn't revolve around a nucleus lacks an orbital and hence is unsplittable, and is regarded as an elementary particle.

Boson-like

• Cooper pairs, plasmons and phonons are observed to behave as bosons.