The Four Fundamental Forces

Learning objectives

Section Key Terms

Understanding the Four Forces

The gravitational force is most familiar to us because it describes so many of our common observations. It explains why a dropped ball falls to the ground and why our planet orbits the Sun. It gives us the property of weight and determines much about the motion of objects in our daily lives. Because gravitational force acts between all objects of mass and has the ability to act over large distances, the gravitational force can be used to explain much of what we observe and can even describe the motion of objects on astronomical scales! That said, gravity is incredibly weak compared to the other fundamental forces and is the weakest of all of the fundamental forces. Consider this: The entire mass of Earth is needed to hold an iron nail to the ground. Yet with a simple magnet, the force of gravity can be overcome, allowing the nail to accelerate upward through space.

The electromagnetic force is responsible for both electrostatic interactions and the magnetic force seen between bar magnets. When focusing on the electrostatic relationship between two charged particles, the electromagnetic force is known as the coulomb force. The electromagnetic force is an important force in the chemical and biological sciences, as it is responsible for molecular connections like ionic bonding and hydrogen bonding. Additionally, the electromagnetic force is behind the common physics forces of friction and the normal force. Like the gravitational force, the electromagnetic force is an inverse square law. However, the electromagnetic force does not exist between any two objects of mass, only those that are charged.

When considering the structure of an atom, the electromagnetic force is somewhat apparent. After all, the electrons are held in place by an attractive force from the nucleus. But what causes the nucleus to remain intact? After all, if all protons are positive, it makes sense that the coulomb force between the protons would repel the nucleus apart immediately. Scientists theorized that another force must exist within the nucleus to keep it together. They further theorized that this nuclear force must be significantly stronger than gravity, which has been observed and measured for centuries, and also stronger than the electromagnetic force, which would cause the protons to want to accelerate away from each other.

The strong nuclear force is an attractive force that exists between all nucleons. This force, which acts equally between proton-proton connections, proton-neutron connections, and neutron-neutron connections, is the strongest of all forces at short ranges. However, at a distance of 10^–13 cm, or the diameter of a single proton, the force dissipates to zero. If the nucleus is large (it has many nucleons), then the distance between each nucleon could be much larger than the diameter of a single proton.

The weak nuclear force is responsible for beta decay, as seen in the equation ${}_Z^A{X}_N \to { }_{Z+1}^A{Y}_{N–1} + e + v.$ Recall that beta decay is when a beta particle is ejected from an atom. In order to accelerate away from the nucleus, the particle must be acted on by a force. Enrico Fermi was the first to envision this type of force. While this force is appropriately labeled, it remains stronger than the gravitational force. However, its range is even smaller than that of the strong force, as can be seen in Table_23_01. The weak nuclear force is more important than it may appear at this time, as will be addressed when we discuss quarks.

Transmitting the Four Fundamental Forces

Just as it troubled Einstein prior to formulating the gravitational field theory, the concept of forces acting over a distance had greatly troubled particle physicists. That is, how does one proton know that another exists? Furthermore, what causes one proton to make a second proton repel? Or, for that matter, what is it about a proton that causes a neutron to attract? These mysterious interactions were first considered by Hideki Yukawa in 1935 and laid the foundation for much of what we now understand about particle physics.

Hideki Yukawa’s focus was on the strong nuclear force and, in particular, its incredibly short range. His idea was a blend of particles, relativity, and quantum mechanics that was applicable to all four forces. Yukawa proposed that the nuclear force is actually transmitted by the exchange of particles, called carrier particles, and that what we commonly refer to as the force’s field consists of these carrier particles. Specifically for the strong nuclear force, Yukawa proposed that a previously unknown particle, called a pion, is exchanged between nucleons, transmitting the force between them. Figure_23_01_Pion illustrates how a pion would carry a force between a proton and a neutron.

In Yukawa’s strong force, the carrier particle is assumed to be transmitted at the speed of light and is continually transferred between the two nucleons shown. The particle that Yukawa predicted was finally discovered within cosmic rays in 1947. Its name, the pion, stands for pi meson, where meson means medium mass; it’s a medium mass because it is smaller than a nucleon but larger than an electron. Yukawa launched the field that is now called quantum chromodynamics, and the carrier particles are now called gluons due to their strong binding power. The reason for the change in the particle name will be explained when quarks are discussed later in this section.

As you may assume, the strong force is not the only force with a carrier particle. Nuclear decay from the weak force also requires a particle transfer. In the weak force are the following three: the weak negative carrier, W^–; the weak positive carrier, W⁺; and the zero charge carrier, Z⁰. As we will see, Fermi inferred that these particles must carry mass, as the total mass of the products of nuclear decay is slightly larger than the total mass of all reactants after nuclear decay.

The carrier particle for the electromagnetic force is, not surprisingly, the photon. After all, just as a lightbulb can emit photons from a charged tungsten filament, the photon can be used to transfer information from one electrically charged particle to another. Finally, the graviton is the proposed carrier particle for gravity. While it has not yet been found, scientists are currently looking for evidence of its existence (see Boundless Physics: Searching for the Graviton).

So how does a carrier particle transmit a fundamental force? Figure_23_01_Photon shows a virtual photon transmitted from one positively charged particle to another. The transmitted photon is referred to as a virtual particle because it cannot be directly observed while transmitting the force. Figure_23_01_Feynman shows a way of graphing the exchange of a virtual photon between the two positively charged particles. This graph of time versus position is called a Feynman diagram, after the brilliant American physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988), who developed it.

The Feynman diagram should be read from the bottom up to show the movement of particles over time. In it, you can see that the left proton is propelled leftward from the photon emission, while the right proton feels an impulse to the right when the photon is received. In addition to the Feynman diagram, Richard Feynman was one of the theorists who developed the field of quantum electrodynamics (QED), which further describes electromagnetic interactions on the submicroscopic scale. For this work, he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize with Julian Schwinger and S.I. Tomonaga. A Feynman diagram explaining the strong force interaction hypothesized by Yukawa can be seen in Figure_23_01_FeynYuk. Here, you can see the change in particle type due to the exchange of the pi meson.

The relative masses of the listed carrier particles describe something valuable about the four fundamental forces, as can be seen in Table_23_02. W bosons (consisting of ${\text{W}}^{-}$ and ${\text{W}}^{+}$ bosons) and Z bosons ( ${\text{Z}}^0$ bosons), carriers of the weak nuclear force, are nearly 1,000 times more massive than pions, carriers of the strong nuclear force. Simultaneously, the distance that the weak nuclear force can be transmitted is approximately $\frac{1}{\mathrm{1,000}}$ times the strong force transmission distance. Unlike carrier particles, which have a limited range, the photon is a massless particle that has no limit to the transmission distance of the electromagnetic force. This relationship leads scientists to understand that the yet-unfound graviton is likely massless as well.

Accelerators Create Matter From Energy

Before looking at all the particles that make up our universe, let us first examine some of the machines that create them. The fundamental process in creating unknown particles is to accelerate known particles, such as protons or electrons, and direct a beam of them toward a target. Collisions with target nuclei provide a wealth of information, such as information obtained by Rutherford in the gold foil experiment. If the energy of the incoming particles is large enough, new matter can even be created in the collision. The more energy input or ΔE, the more matter m can be created, according to mass energy equivalence $m=\text{Δ}E/c^2$ . Limitations are placed on what can occur by known conservation laws, such as conservation of mass-energy, momentum, and charge. Even more interesting are the unknown limitations provided by nature. While some expected reactions do occur, others do not, and still other unexpected reactions may appear. New laws are revealed, and the vast majority of what we know about particle physics has come from accelerator laboratories. It is the particle physicist’s favorite indoor sport.

Our earliest model of a particle accelerator comes from the Van de Graaff generator. The relatively simple device, which you have likely seen in physics demonstrations, can be manipulated to produce potentials as great as 50 million volts. While these machines do not have energies large enough to produce new particles, analysis of their accelerated ions was instrumental in exploring several aspects of the nucleus.

Another equally famous early accelerator is the cyclotron, invented in 1930 by the American physicist, E.O. Lawrence (1901–1958). Figure_23_01_Cyclotron is a visual representation with more detail. Cyclotrons use fixed-frequency alternating electric fields to accelerate particles. The particles spiral outward in a magnetic field, making increasingly larger radius orbits during acceleration. This clever arrangement allows the successive addition of electric potential energy with each loop. As a result, greater particle energies are possible than in a Van de Graaff generator.

A synchrotron is a modification of the cyclotron in which particles continually travel in a fixed-radius orbit, increasing speed each time. Accelerating voltages are synchronized with the particles to accelerate them, hence the name. Additionally, magnetic field strength is increased to keep the orbital radius constant as energy increases. A ring of magnets and accelerating tubes, as shown in Figure_23_01_Synchro, are the major components of synchrotrons. High-energy particles require strong magnetic fields to steer them, so superconducting magnets are commonly employed. Still limited by achievable magnetic field strengths, synchrotrons need to be very large at very high energies since the radius of a high-energy particle’s orbit is very large.

To further probe the nucleus, physicists need accelerators of greater energy and detectors of shorter wavelength. To do so requires not only greater funding but greater ingenuity as well. Colliding beams used at both the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab; see Figure_23_01_FermiLab2) near Chicago and the LHC in Switzerland are designed to reduce energy loss in particle collisions. Typical stationary particle detectors lose a large amount of energy to the recoiling target struck by the accelerating particle. By providing head-on collisions between particles moving in opposite directions, colliding beams make it possible to create particles with momenta and kinetic energies near zero. This allows for particles of greater energy and mass to be created. Figure_23_01_FermiLab is a schematic representation of this effect. In addition to circular accelerators, linear accelerators can be used to reduce energy radiation losses. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now called the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) in California is home to the largest such accelerator in the world.

Check Your Understanding

Section Summary

• The four fundamental forces are gravity, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.
• A variety of particle accelerators have been used to explore the nature of subatomic particles and to test predictions of particle theories.

Concept Items

Critical Thinking

Test Prep Multiple Choice

Test Prep Short Answer

Test Prep Extended Response

Glossary

carrier particle

a virtual particle exchanged in the transmission of a fundamental force

colliding beam

head-on collisions between particles moving in opposite directions

cyclotron

accelerator that uses fixed-frequency alternating electric fields and fixed magnets to accelerate particles in a circular spiral path

Feynman diagram

a graph of time versus position that describes the exchange of virtual particles between subatomic particles

graviton

hypothesized particle exchanged between two particles of mass, transmitting the gravitational force between them

particle physics

the study of and the quest for those truly fundamental particles having no substructure

pion

particle exchanged between nucleons, transmitting the strong nuclear force between them

quantum electrodynamics

the theory of electromagnetism on the particle scale

synchrotron

a version of a cyclotron in which the frequency of the alternating voltage and the magnetic field strength are increased as the beam particles are accelerated

${\text{W}}^{-}$ boson

negative carrier particle of the weak nuclear force

${\text{W}}^{+}$ boson

positive carrier particle of the weak nuclear force

weak nuclear force

fundamental force responsible for particle decay

${\text{Z}}^0$ boson

neutral carrier particle of the weak nuclear force