Question: How do protons and neutrons work?

Flavia de Almeida Dias answered on 10 Nov 2015:

Hmm. I guess you will have to be more specific than that, I am not sure I understand what you mean by “how they work”.

Both protons and neutrons are composite particles – they are made of smaller parts, called quarks and gluons. Quarks are the particles which constitute the protons and neutrons, and we think quarks are elementary. There are six kinds of quark, divided in two types and three families: the up and down quarks are the quarks from the first generation, and they make up both protons and neutrons. The up quark has charge +2/3, and the down quark has charge -1/3. So a proton has charge +1, and is made of two up quarks and one down quark (summing up the charges, +2/3+2/3-1/3 = 3/3 = 1). A neutron has charge 0, and is made of one up quark and two down quarks (+2/3 -1/3 -1/3 = 0). Those quarks are kept together via a force which we call the strong force, and the gluons are the particles which are their force carriers. They are called gluons because they are the glue which keep the quarks together.

Protons and neutrons can then combine, together with electrons, to form atoms, which then form the molecules making up everything we know

Please let me know if you wanted to know something else about how they work 🙂