Question

What is the difference between baryons and mesons

Answer 1

Baryons consist of 3 quarks and
mesons consist of 2 . They are both
hadrons.
Full story:
The current state of our knowledge (also called: the Standard Model ) is that the matter in the Universe consists of three types of particles: quarks, leptons and bosons.
2.1k Views · View Upvoters Answered Jul 14, 2016 · Author has 61 answers and 154.4k answer views Maciej Lewicki, PhD student at Uni of Wrocław, works for NA61/SHINE at CERN
Bosons are responsible for particle interactions. The best example is a photon , taking care of electromagnetic interactions.
Leptons are elementary particles: electron, muon and taon with their corresponding neutrinos.
Quarks are the object of interest in this answer.
They are elementary particles unlike the others mentioned above — they don’t exist in separation — one can never observe a single quark. They only come in twos or threes, most likely also in fours and fives (not yet confirmed experimentally).
Such teams of quarks we are calling hadrons. With specific names assigned for a certain number of team members:
mesons (2 quarks), baryons (3 quarks) and self-explanatory
tetra-quarks , penta-quarks .
Mesons are the lightest particles (pions, kaons ), frequently produced in particle collisions — both in specially dedicated experiments and as an effect of high energetic cosmic rays interacting with atoms in the atmosphere.
Such particles are usually
not stable, with the longest-lived lasting for only a few hundredths of a microsecond. Being unstable they don’t have a chance to become a building blocks of the matter as we know it.
Baryons on the other hand are quite familiar for us, as some of them are very stable (protons and
neutrons when inside the nucleus) and therefore they are, together with electrons, the main constituents of the material World around us.
Most of them are also highly unstable ([math]\Delta[/math],
[math]\Sigma[/math]), so we don’t see them often and we needed particle accelerators with precise detectors to discover them.
We suspect that quarks come together also in higher numbers as tetra-quarks and penta-quarks . It seems plausible in theoretical calculations and recently the data from LHC showed indications of the existence of the latter.
They will al