Question

What is inside an electron?

Answer 1

Possibly even more fundamental particles such as "quarks". This is the area in physics known as "particle physics", and one place where it is investigated is at CERN in Europe where someone's built an enormous tunnel in the shape of a doughnut and through the tunnel they pass protons at speeds approaching that of the speed of light - 300, 000, 000 m/s - and then, almost literally bang the protons into each other, and then try to analyse what comes out. That way they hope to work out the structure of the proton. The machine I've just described is called the "Large Hadron Collider", or "LHC". All very glamorous stuff.

Answer 2

cheese

Answer 3

I just want to fill in to make osprey's answer more complete. In particle physics you divide into groups. The three largest ones are elementary, composite and quasi particle families.

The elementary group of particles are those particles that have no measurable "composition" yet. You can't know what they're comprised of since you can't measure it. Electrons belong into this group of particles. More specifically they are fermions. Fermions can be split in two groups, quarks and leptons. Electrons are leptons.

The composite group is the group that has all the particles constructed from the elementary particles. Protons are made out of 2 up quarks and a down quark. This group is also sometimes just called hadrons. Neutrons are hadrons too. Specifically, proton and neutrons are baryons.

The quasi group doesn't have to worry you a lot, it's sort of a imagined group of particles that are used to replace forces and ease the calculations.

Now back to the question again. This is where we hit a bit of a wall. I'm not sure how deep I should take it so I'll keep it basic. In particle physics you use "fields" to describe "things". So every type of particle has a field attacked to it. In the case of an electron the field you would use to describe it is called fermionic field. There are different mathematical equations that describe this field but all these equations have to "produce" a fermion particle.

You have to stop thinking about a particle as a particle (a ball, a sphere or whatever usually gets drawn in textbooks and pop-sci magazines). Particles aren't stuff, they're just local excitation of that field. If you imagine a perfectly still pool of water and your hand under it. When you bump your hand left/right/up/down on the surface of that still water you'll create waves and ripples. That's what particles basically are - waves.

So there's no "stuff" that makes them. In all dangers of sounding new-agey they're just energy that is attributed to some local excitation of their quantum electromagnetic fields.

Answer 4

@ljetibo they're just energy that is attributed to some local excitation of their quantum electromagnetic fields ... so that to "explain" their being attributed with the properties of a particle, such as mass, perhaps it's "Einstein's mass-energy time" ?
@UnkleRhaukus cheese ? COULD BE - is THAT what all those people at CERN and MIT etc etc are missing. Better send them a light signal, preferably faster than the speed of light 'cos its an emergency.

Answer 5

Well I was kind of simplifying my answer in reality it's not just that simple. You can't just take i.e. 3J and say that's a particle. Physics uses a a different math approach when it comes to the Standard Model (which is the models used when talking about particles, interactions and forces between them).

The Standard Model is described through group theory as:
$$SU(3)\times SU(2)\times SU(1)$$
Groups are the things like rings, fields and vector spaces that have extra rules put on them. So a lot of it should feel familiar. From the group definition you can at least already see that the end result will be just a bunch of matrices multiplied and added together. These groups weren't picked on random, they're so-called special unitary group.

Well anyhow, now we skip about a year of math details, and then about a year of introduction to particle physics and I give you the Lagrangian of the system:
http://einstein-schrodinger.com/Standard_Model.pdf
In truth people just look at the bit more simplified Lagrangian that you can find on the wiki, but it's the same thing.

I show you that because you might be able to recognize some things there. Stuff like Higgs field and mass terms. Interaction between this field with the other fields is what gives mass to the particles. Except for photons and by "common arrangement" neutrinos. I say "common arrangement" because it's generally considered neutrinos have mass, but it's still so small you can't exactly measure it so it's fine to say they don't have it for the sake of simplification.

The important process in interaction between the fields and Higgs field is spontaneous symmetry breaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_symmetry_breaking (symmetry and unitary groups are in the skipped math).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism#Consequences_for_fermions

Answer 6

@osprey (don't know if it'll notify you otherwise)

Answer 7

@ljetibo Just had a look at your postings ... intrigued ...