Particle physics of the twenty-first century

Elementary particle physics is the science devoted to searching for the ultimate constituents of matter and the interactions among them. The last 20 years has seen the emergence of the Standard Model. This is the single unified picture which gives us a language for discussing all the phenomena we see about us and for organizing that information and trying to understand it. Another important development has been the formulation of a mathematical expression for the forces of nature. These are called the gauge theories of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions. The Standard Model has a couple of basic facets. One is that the elementary particles are quarks and leptons. Leptons experience gravitational, weak, and electromagnetic interactions and quarks experience the strong interaction. The carriers of these interactions are gluon for the strong, photon for the electromagnetic, intermediate bosons for the weak, and graviton for gravity. These facts have emerged through experiments using accelerators and detectors. However at energies for collisions among the fundamental constituents of about 1 TeV, the Standard Model ceases to make sense, so it can not be complete. Something else must be happening. Hence, more experiments need to be carried out. The instrument chosen for this is the Superconducting Super Collider. 12 figures, 1 table